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Is it possible to allocate less % to a person(say Alan) only for the days he helps Jorge as well as does his work? ie Say Alan has a task whose period is 6 days.And if Alan has to help Jorge for half the day on 3 days while the other half day he does his own task, can we then show him at 50% each for the two tasks on those 3 days, while on other days he is allocated 100% ? How does one calculate the % in such cases when there may be more than 2 overlapping tasks for a single resource. Thanks Pitre

kedar Pitre
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No it is not possible to vary allocations in that way.

You have two pieces of data you can play with:

  • A resource's max units (How much of their day they can work on the project)
  • A resource's allocation (How much of their day they can be allocated to a specific task

You can prioritise one task over another, so that the allocated resources will attempt to finish it before lower priority tasks, before moving on to other tasks, but you cannot vary a resource's allocation to a task depending on what day it is.

You could split a task into multiple one-day chunks and vary a resource's allocation to those tasks, but the plan would quickly become a maintenance nightmare for anything more than a trivial number of tasks, particularly if those tasks started moving around in the plan.

Marv Mills
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  • Thank you Mills. If there are 2-3 tasks of less than a days duration, which are to be completed on the same day, is it OK if we show all the 3 tasks starting and finishing on the same day(ie of one day duration) or is there a better way? – kedar Pitre Apr 29 '15 at 05:00
  • It would be better to put in the real duration of the tasks and let MS-Project schedule them all on the same day. If you made each one a day long Project will not be able to schedule them on the same day as that would over-allocate the resource (assuming you are using automatic scheduling of course) – Marv Mills Apr 29 '15 at 08:19
  • You can manually "level" a resource's work in the Resource Usage view by editing the time phased work. However, as Marv mentions that becomes a maintenance nightmare. Once or twice is manageable - more than that doesn't really work well. – JulieS Apr 29 '15 at 19:27
  • Thank you Marv and Julie. My next question is : I am handling anything upto 15 projects. The resource pool is common to all projects. Is it possible to link the resource pool for all projects so that I can check over- allocation of resources across projects in MS Project professional? Or is a server required. In any case how does one make the resource pool common between projects? – kedar Pitre Apr 30 '15 at 10:20
  • You should raise new questions as actual questions rather than comments on an existing answer. You might also want to check out the Project Management Stack Exchange site here: http://pm.stackexchange.com/questions – Marv Mills Apr 30 '15 at 10:42