See employee availability by week or month.
How can you tell when employees are schedule for work, and when they need more projects to work on? You could try to remember. Or you could just ask the employee. Or you could guess. But there’s a simpler way to check employee scheduling and availability. Choose View, Project Resource Allocation. Consider this "Part 1" of the Resource Allocation video.
When you choose this menu, a window opens that displays a bar chart showing when each employee is scheduled to work. You’ll see red bars for over-scheduled months, yellow bars for under-scheduled months, and blue bars for correctly-scheduled. This graphical view lets you look out into future months to see exactly when employees are scheduled. If you see any yellow bars, you’ll know they need some work. You could shift around projects in the red bars, or assign the employee to new projects. (They can get an email notification when you make that new assignment.)
There are actually two methods of scheduling employees to work on projects. We’ll discuss both the simple and advanced methods below.
Simple Project Scheduling: In this method, you can simply assign employees to projects and set a percentage of their daily hours to that project. No tasks are needed. The employee is simply expected to work a specified percentage of their day on the projects they are assigned to. The Resource Allocation window displays bars for each period of time they are working on projects. They can be assigned to multiple projects, which makes the bars stack up. If they are assigned to too many projects, you’ll see a red bar indicating they are over-allocated. Yellow bars means they need more work. Blue bars means everything is just about right. Projects have start and finish dates, which dictate the duration of employee work.
Advanced Project Scheduling: For advanced project scheduling, you can subdivide projects into tasks. Each task has a start and due date that are used for scheduling, and a duration that is used to set the number of hours the employee should work during this date range. Tasks can overlap, which means the employee is responsible for multiple tasks during a period of time. The principles are the same as the simple method above – red, yellow, and blue bars indicating hours of scheduling for each time period in the bar chart.
You’ll notice that the inverse of Resource Allocation is Employee Availability. In other words, employees are available when they have not been scheduled to work. If you look out into the future and see yellow or blue bars then you must assign new projects or tasks to the employee to keep them working.
Also see: Video: Project Resource Allocation, Video: Timephased Hours, or Employee Task Scheduling, Video: Assigning Resources By Skill
More videos to explore
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