Hi Rafael,

Thank you for your kind words on your experience of using Micro Planner X-Pert.

Hi Rafael,

I’ve used Micro Planner X-Pert before where resources are added and can then be assigned to "Groups". These Groups can be assigned labels such as "Electrician, "Software C++", "Chemist", etc.

Then as the resources are added to the group you can also decide what % of their time is used in the group and the remainder as individual resources.

This is quite a useful facility and will recognise a resources availability from his personal "calendar".

If you need more then please call, or email.

John Cornish
Micro Planning International Ltd
Tel: +44 1202 884690
john@microplanning.co.uk

Hi Giles,

I believe you need to revisit where you will use the resource group code. By assigning values to the resource group code, then using "group by" command to the resource usage view, you will see which resources are assigned to a certain group. In your case, Alex K. and System Analyst should have System Analyst as Group Code.

I hope this works for you.

Alexandre,
Spider Project does it easily. We always recommend to have several project budgets in parallel - PM Team budget, Management budget, contractual budget, etc. Spider Project permits to compare any budgets with each other, current values with the previous values, etc. Any kind of comparative analysis including trend analysis.

We usually deal with large projects. And manual resource assignment that considers resource availability, resource productivity, resource cost, resource priority, activity priority, etc. is hard to do and even harder to reconsider each time when the schedule was changed. Wrong assignments lead to unnecessary delays - resource that was assigned may be busy on some activity and some other resource that have necessary skill may be available but not assigned.
Resources may be people or machines. Just imagine that you have many trucks with different capacities. You need to assign trucks to move something from one place to another. If you assign some special trucks then you may cause delay if some of assigned trucks are not available at the moment when activity is ready to start. If you assign skill Truck and specify the required number of trucks or their cumulative productivity Spider Project will select available trucks and assign those that will do the job best basing on user defined criteria (manually defined priorities, minimal duration, minimal cost or other criteria). Do you think that selecting proper truck types is so creative that can be done only by people?
People can define priorities and Spider Project will look at priorities first. But if resources with highest priorities are busy the software will look at other resources with the same skills.
If you want to assign specific resources then you shall assign these resources, not skills.

Best Regards,
Vladimir

Alexandre,
the question was "I am looking for the following functionality, and I am wondering, if there is a trick to achieve it some how with MS Project. If not, are there any other tools, which can do it?"

You did not understand my post.
Skill scheduling means that you assign skills and the software selects which resources that have these skills to assign on each activity.

The tools that you mentioned do not select resources - they suggest to do it manually. In large projects it is too hard to make proper selections. It is impossible to reconsider assignments each time when the fact differs from the plan.
Best Regards,
Vladimir

From my previous posts this is what I got, sorry I don’t see much of a difference to your original request, my misunderstanding.

Fhttp://rapidshare.com/files/242326833/Define_Resource_Groups_as_Roles.pdf

http://rapidshare.com/files/242335450/Resource_Roles.mpp

I am struggling to learn MS Project and take the most out of it, I am used to P3 and change is hard. This will be my last posting into your thread, good luck.

Rafael

What about this approach?

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/project/HP452955231033.aspx

2 strikes?