Capacity planning by task priority

S
S K 👤 Member for 9 years 4 months

Hello all,

I am rather new to project management and MS project with only a few months experience in an assisiting role. My company is using MS project 2013 and after some intro and self-learning a found myself challenged when trying to introduce a dynamic capacity planning of personnel resources according to task priority and would highly appreciate your insights.

Here is the situation: About 50% of my capacity per SW release would be booked by high priority tasks, while the other half should be filled with second highes priority etc. However, I wondered if it was possible to show "available resource capacity" vs. "sum of effort of assigned tasks by resource" according to a filter (like priority).

So, ideally I would like to manipulate the "priority" column in the first table below and should get sth. like an automatically updated pivot table (my current work around in excel) that shows me that:

1. if I assign priority 1 to Mark and he has a capacity of 2 days, there is a positive delta btw. effort and capacity (2nd table)

2. if I assign priority 1 to only task 2 or 3 than Eva can fulfill either, again a positive delta

3. if I assign priority 1 to both tasks 2 and 3 than Eva can't fulfill them together, negative delta

Example table in ms project#task nameresource nameeffort (in PD)priority1abcMark212defEva423ghiEva31

 

Example availability of resources

#nameavailabilty (in PDs)1Mark22Eva2

 

Questions:

1. Is that possible?

2. How do you deal with those situations?

3. Better software for aligning project plan and resource planning?

 

Thanks in advance for your support!

 

BR Stefan

Featured Partner

Top Posters

Zine Eddine
2 posts
Alex Lyaschenko
27 posts
mxsiegel
0 posts
Mattvtek
0 posts
Gareth Evans
3 posts
PP Admin
3, 129 posts
Rajkamal Tangirala
5 posts
Rahul Kumar
1 posts
blake333_
0 posts
Jeamiell Ostrovsky
2 posts