I own a small software company.
We have many projects going on at the same time.
In Microsoft Project, we can create project plan and keep track of resources (developers) at a project level.
I would like to know if I can see employee allocations at company level.
Thanks!
If all the projects are independent you should be able to cut & paste them all into a single Project file without introducing any errors. So long as there is a standard nomenclature across projects for the different resources you should be able to get a clear idea of who is doing what when.
If your projects are interdependent you are probably keeping a program/portfolio level gantt in order to flag when problems in one project impact another. You may need to introduce more granularity into this kind of gantt to track individual developers and tasks, depending on how much detail you need.
It would be very cumbersome to use MS Project Professional or MS Project Standard. However, MS Project Server provides the enterprise view of projects and resources using a single, central data repository. MS Project Server 2013 has been re-architected to a single physical data base, with 4 logical databases including draft plans (not visible to anyone but the creator), published plans (visible to all authorized users), archive plans, and the reporting database.
This product is available through a subscription service provided by different vendors, including Microsoft Office 365. The price is reasonable, and depending on the needs of individual users, may only require online access for all accept "heavy-duty" project managers.
An interesting point - Microsoft recently announced at the 2014 MS Project Conference in Anaheim that they will be selling a new "cloud-based" subscription for project team members at $7 per month. This provides full read-access to projects on which the team member is assigned, and update access for their assigned tasks and timesheets.
I don't see on your question the purpose of having a view at company level. Would you like to have the ability of 'shifting' resources between project based on each project's demand?
If you want to have this information to know who are the available resources, putting all your projects in a single MS Project file may give you headaches on the near future for two reasons:
A project plan is a document that needs to be constantly updated. Keeping it up to date at project level is already a pain... at company level (having several projects) on the same document will be a nightmare
As any shared document, you'll need a document owner, otherwise you'll have your managers allocating resources without taking into account other projects' needs
All in all, if you need such information to know how many resources you have available at a specific point in time, I'd use a ticket tracking system where you could see the pool of resources with no / less tasks assigned.
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