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Please kindly help me find way to solve in MS Project.
I have two Resources below:
Employee_A = 4 hours per week only, but can work any day
Employee_B = 12 hours per week only, but can work any day
MS Project just lets me put how many hours a resource can work on a certain day. But what if my resource can work any day as long as he completes the given hours? How can I setup these info to MS Project?
Please really needs help. Thank you very much.
When you add resources to your project you can specify whether they are full-time or part-time or multiple resources. You do this using the Max Units field for the Resource Type. See the Project 2010 documentation on how to Add resources to your project. In your case, for Employee_A you can enter 10% and for Employee_B you can enter 30% in the Max Units field.
Why are you trying to solve this problem? Planning and scheduling is not about being accurate with zero variance. What is important is the start and end. You want to schedule the resource start so the resource is available and you schedule when it ends because we put deadlines on things. What happens in between is immaterial (immaterial in terms of what you are describing here, not in terms of trending analysis such as cost variances and schedule variances used to predict the future).
If you have no specific information about when these two employees will work, simply distribute the hours evenly across the available duration. If you think they will work front loaded or back loaded, distribute accordingly. You WILL accrue variances. Always. You need to expect them and actually want them because zero variance usually indicates someone is screwing with the books.
So scheduling specific hours with total accuracy is a waste of time.
If you change the max for employees it will create issues by extending your timeline. For example, if you have a project with 8 hours, and an 50% max employee working on it, it will say it will take 16 hours to complete, because it will take a 50% employee twice as much time. If you want the hours/days you specified to stay the same, but still increase your timeline, then that won't work.
What i found works is to create a separate calendar and set the employee's schedule to the new calendar. For example, i have employees that can only work 15 hours a week. So i created a calendar with default work weeks from only 9:00-12:00. I assigned this calendar to each part time employee. When i assign the employee to a 30 hour task, it still says it is 30 hours, but shows that it will take 2 weeks to complete.
