I forgot to mention that I also assigned priorities to all of the tasks, so that the tasks that were most critical would be scheduled first when the crane resource was a tie.

What we are really doing is running a rolling schedule, with the critical path having dedicated resources, and the other resources being doled out among the other tasks scheduled for that day.

So Day 1, we have 15 tasks that could get done that day. We have a pool of 30 people for work crews.

I got the numbers of staff needed for each job during my estimation phase, which the project manager/supervisor will use to decide which jobs will get worked that shift.

In this instance, the PM decides that jobs 1-10 (each require a six person crew for 6 hours) will get worked this shift. With each crew doing two jobs during the shift. The other 5 jobs will be scheduled the next shift.

At the end of the shift, we get updated task status and rerun the schedule. Jobs 1-9 were completed during the shift, so they are marked as done. Job 10 was more complicated than we expected, so we had to schedule its remaining work during the next shift.

We only have a 15 person pool during the night shift, so the Project Manager schedules 6 people to complete the 6 hours remaining on Job 10 and and then splits the remaining 9 people out to work on 3 person jobs that will each fit in the 12 hours the shift. The 6 people on job 10 will be split out to 2 crews of three to work on three person jobs that can be done by the end of the shift if possible, or will be split out to other crews as needed.

We’ll run this schedule each day, watching to make sure that the remaining Priority 1 and 2 work doesn’t go past the deadline.

If I had my druthers, I would have been here 6 months ago to do this, rather than 2 months ago, but I ate what was set before me .

Larry

Not really a solution as much as a workaround. My project has two 12 hour shifts that share equipment resources. At first I tried scheduling everything on a 24 hour schedule but it turns out that Project will then schedule equipment during the day and the workers at night. Not terribly useful. To solve this problem, I divided the workers into day and night crews and the equipment into day and night crews. That still didn’t work, as there was no way to force Project to schedule the equipment for the same hours as the crews.

What I finally did was just focus on scheduling the equipment, as the availability of workers was up to the supervisors in the field as conditions change.

So now, I know whether or not I have enough cranes to do the work each hour, but not whether I have enough people, but as most of the tasks are critical mass rather than critical path (the critical path tasks have dedicated equipment and resources) the main job is to make sure we continue to make progress on the critical mass tasks.

The discussion here has been very helpful in deciding to take this approach. My hope is to persuade the client to move to SureTrak or P3 ASAP, but I’m willing to bet they have a corporate MS license, so it may be somewhat difficult to do.