Microsoft Project 2010 : Using the Resource Sheet View

Defining Resources and Resource Information

Resources are the backbone of a project. Without resources to complete assigned tasks, those tasks would not be completed. Essentially, the cost of a project is a reflection of the sum of all project resources’ costs needed to complete each task within the project.

Examples of resources are workers, supervisors, managers, facilities, factories, equipment, travel costs, supplies, and materials.

Project 2010 includes three types of resources: work, material, and cost. Work resources are resources that are not consumed at the completion of their assigned task and are available to be assigned to future tasks. The ultimate example of a work resource is people. Material resources, on the other hand, are consumed or used up as a task progresses. Ink, gasoline, concrete, and camera film are examples of material resources. Cost resources represent additional costs incurred on a task that used to be hard to track prior to the addition of the Cost resource type in Project. The most common example of a cost resource is travel expenses.

Understanding Budget Resources

In addition to the three resource types, Project 2010 includes an option to define the cost or work type as a Budget resource. Budget resources are assigned on the project summary task. Budget Cost and Budget Work are included in baselines, and you can use them as a reference point when creating and tracking your schedule costs/work.

Distinguishing Single and Group Resources

Some resources that you add to a resource list represent individual people or assets. A resource name could be a person’s name, for example. Also, you can name a single piece of equipment, a facility, or a raw material as a resource. If you contract out a task to a vendor who is totally responsible for the task, you could simply name the vendor as a resource, even though there might be many individuals on the vendor’s team who actually work on the task.

You can also define a resource to represent multiple resources. These could be a group of individual people with similar skills, or multiple pieces of identical equipment. The max units for the resource should be set to the total number of resources available as part of the set. For example, Moving Truck’s Max Units of 500% mean you have five trucks included within the resource defined. With this type of resource, you are not concerned with assigning individual resources by name to a given task. For example, you might define a group of seven engineers as the “Engineers” resource, and the manager of those engineers would dictate which of the seven engineers would work on the task. Similarly, you could define a group of five work trucks as the “Trucks” resource, and assign at 500% to a single task. This would represent in the schedule that the task needs five trucks to accomplish the work within the duration of the task. Another option would be to assign at 100%, and the person in charge of the work trucks would decide which one would be used to complete the task.

Using Generic Resources for Common Skills

In many cases, the project manager does not know the capabilities and skills of many individual resources or does not have the authority to assign individuals by name to a task. Generic resources can be defined as a common skill or capability—for example, you are starting a project that will require carpenters to work on multiple tasks. If you are staffed with three carpenters but are unsure of which one will be the best for a certain task, you could create a generic resource called “Carpenters” and assign it to all the individual tasks. Later, you can substitute the names of the specific carpenters in the appropriate task assignments.

This process gives you the advantage of deducing the total number of carpenters needed to complete the project without assigning individuals to the specific tasks. This is especially relevant when many project managers share the same resources in a shared resource pool. After you have figured out how many carpenters you need, you can see which specific individuals are available and are the best fit for the specific tasks.

Using the Resource Sheet View

One of the most effective and commonly used views for manually entering basic resource information is the Resource Sheet view. The Resource Sheet enables you to see many resources on the screen at once. It also shows you a number of important fields for each resource. Indicators notify you when there is critical information in other fields (see Figure 1). To display the Resource Sheet view, click the View control on either the Task or Resource tab and choose Resource Sheet. For now, use the Resource tab because that will provide resource-centric functionality.

Figure 1. The information column includes additional information available about a resource, such as external hyperlinks, notes, and so on.

If your video resolution is 800×600 pixels or less, you will have to scroll to the right to see all the columns of the Resource Sheet. Select a resource and click the Details toggle on the Resource tab. You can see all the fields for the resource that is selected in the top pane .

You can also use the Resource Form view to display and edit the Notes field. To display the notes, follow these steps:

Figure 2. In addition to Notes, you can select many other details, such as Cost, Schedule, and Work.