Hello all,

I am rather new to project management and MS project with only a few months experience in an assisiting role. My company is using MS project 2013 and after some intro and self-learning a found myself challenged when trying to introduce a dynamic capacity planning of personnel resources according to task priority and would highly appreciate your insights.

Here is the situation: About 50% of my capacity per SW release would be booked by high priority tasks, while the other half should be filled with second highes priority etc. However, I wondered if it was possible to show "available resource capacity" vs. "sum of effort of assigned tasks by resource" according to a filter (like priority).

So, ideally I would like to manipulate the "priority" column in the first table below and should get sth. like an automatically updated pivot table (my current work around in excel) that shows me that:

1. if I assign priority 1 to Mark and he has a capacity of 2 days, there is a positive delta btw. effort and capacity (2nd table)

2. if I assign priority 1 to only task 2 or 3 than Eva can fulfill either, again a positive delta

3. if I assign priority 1 to both tasks 2 and 3 than Eva can't fulfill them together, negative delta

Example availability of resources

Questions:

1. Is that possible?

2. How do you deal with those situations?

3. Better software for aligning project plan and resource planning?

Thanks in advance for your support!

BR Stefan