I have several years of experience working as project manager as well as using MS Project.
But I am not sure, that the planning technique we are using in organization is “the state of the art” one.
I will appreciate if experienced planners can comment on the way we (I ) do the planning using MS Project.
Program setup in MS Project
1) Our group runs several projects, using the same pool of people, therefore we use “resource sharing” in MS Project. There is one dedicated file, which has only resources (no schedule). All individual projects are setup to use resource sharing with this file.
2) There is separate “project” with people’s vacations and holidays. In this project individual vacation is just an activity, to which person is assigned 100%
Stages of planning
1) I 1st make project schedule without resources (only with durations). This is because in our business the duration of activity pretty much doesn’t depend on amount of people involved.
2) Then I assign resources using general names (e.g. Systems Engineer, Field Engineer etc)
3) Once it is done, I check the total budget needed (in man hours).
4) After that I start looking at all tasks and start replacing a generic resources with specific ones on task by task basis (e.g replace Systems Engineer on task “Design system” with Richard Smith )
5) Then I start manual work of resource balancing. I look at the shared resource file and check for resource over allocation / under allocation. I use the following techniques to fix resource over allocation:
a. Assign a task to somebody else
b. Manually delay task (start not earlier then), if the task has a slack.
c. Manually split task
6) I never let MS Project to do resource leveling, because you never know what he has done (or may be I just didn’t master the technique yet).
So, if you have any comments of how the things can be done better of different – I will appreciate them.