Special Edition Using Microsoft Office Project 2003

This chapter describes how to use Microsoft Project's views and tools to assign resources and to modify resource assignments. To benefit the most from this chapter, you should understand the contents of Chapter 8, "Defining Resources and Costs," and Chapter 9, "Understanding Resource Scheduling." The intricate relationships among task and resource fields are covered in those chapters.

When you are assigning resources to tasks , there are a number of data fields you can use to give Microsoft Project the information it needs to calculate schedules and costs as you intend:

• You can choose the task type and effort-driven settings at the task level to control how Project calculates changes in the schedule due to resource assignments.

• You must identify the resource by using its ID or its name when you assign it to a task.

• You can define the number of assigned units, or otherwise let Project assign the default number of units or calculate the number of units based on the amount of work to be done and the duration of the task.

• You can define the amount of work the resource performs or let Project calculate that from the task duration and number of units.

• You can let Project use the default cost rates for the resource or select a special Cost Rate table you have defined if the task is to be charged rates different from those normally used for this resource.

• To speed up progress on the task, you can assign the resource overtime work or modify the resource calendar to provide additional available hours on specific days.

• You can accept the default work pattern for the assignment, which is an even amount of work each day until the task is complete, or you can modify the work contour to schedule more work at different times in the assignment. You can also delay the start of the assignment beyond the start of the task and split the assignment to work around interruptions in the availability of the resource.

As you can see, Project gives you the opportunity to fine-tune resource assignments so that schedule and cost calculations can be very precise. On the other hand, you can also get by with just the minimum amount of definition if you don't need all that sophistication.

This chapter shows how to enter all the information needed to assign resources to tasks. It also describes how to use tools that record the minimum amount of information needed to get the job done. There are a number of different views and tools you can use to assign resources, and you will see how to use all of them. Each has advantages, depending on your objective.