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Forum home » Delegate support and help forum » Microsoft Project Training and help » Managing workloads using Project
Managing workloads using Project
Resolved · Medium Priority · Version 2007
Wed 6 Jan 2010, 14:23Delegate Piers said...
Piers has attended:
Project Intro Intermediate course
Managing workloads using Project
I have 15 individual projects on the go now and when I join them together into one overview project, this amounts to 116 tasks (incl subtasks) covering about 13 different resources.
Now I know I can filter the list to a resource but I want to then filter this list further to show just the tasks that is assigned to that resource for a particular day eg today.
No filter or view or report that I can find will do this for me. Any suggestions??
Thu 7 Jan 2010, 11:19Trainer Simon said...
RE: managing workloads using Project
Hi Piers,
Thank you for your question.
What you need to do is create a Custom Filter.
Go to Project, Filtered for, More Filters and click New. Name the filter in the top box.
Enter the first line of criteria. Choose Resource Names from the Field Name box and Select Equals from the Test box and type the following into the value box: "Enter Name"?
Move to the second line of criteria and choose the And command from the And/Or column. Then choose the Start field from the Field Name box, Equals from the test box and enter "Enter Date"? into the value box.
Then click OK and Apply the filter.
I hope this answers your question.
Regards
Simon
Thu 7 Jan 2010, 12:53Delegate Piers said...
RE: managing workloads using Project
Thanks very much for the reply Simon, however the point is that the start date doesn't help, because its not about when the project has started, its about identifying what tasks are yes due to be started, but also carried on or indeed hopefully finished on a specific date.
Visually this can be seen by finding the day and scanning down for tasks that have got a block in that column, but when working with as many tasks as we have (I was woefully off with my estimation, its more like about a thousand tasks in all) this is not an easy way to work.
Fri 8 Jan 2010, 13:39Trainer Simon said...
RE: managing workloads using Project
Hi Piers,
Thank you for the clarification.
I am finding it difficult to visualise what you are trying to achieve.
Is it possible to send me a portion of your project and could you give me exact details of what you are trying to retrieve.
Working with a portion of your project and having a real example to work with will help me to try and find a solution.
I hope this makes sense.
Could you please send it to sk@stl-training.co.uk
Regards
Simon
Tue 19 Jan 2010, 16:07Trainer Andrew said...
RE: managing workloads using Project
Hi Piers
Thanks for your patience. One way that might get you closer is to refine the filter Simon suggests by adding in criteria rows for Start and Finish dates. When setting the criteria
You can edit the filter above and add in crtiera rows for Start date and Finish date. In the value column for the criteria use a ? rather than a value. When you apply the filter Project will let you specify the start date and finish date before it applies the filter.
Let me know how you get on.
Kind regards,
Andrew
Wed 20 Jan 2010, 10:15Delegate Piers said...
RE: managing workloads using Project
Hi Andrew
Firstly may I say thank you for sticking with this. I know this must be a pain, but its important to me.
I don't see how the task start and finish dates have anything to do with what I am asking for. The task could start today or it may have started a year ago, it doesn't have any bearing on what tasks are scheduled to be worked on today. Admittedly the task will need to have started and indeed won't have finished yet, but that's it.
It is of course starting to look like this isn't possible, which begs the question is this either a shortcoming in Project that only I seem to have identified (highly unlikely!) or is it that I am simply asking too much of MS Project?
If it is indeed the latter, then I am left wondering how other project managers do this. How does anyone else work out what needs to be done today? Maybe Project isn't designed to be used for day to day management of tasks and that one just needs to rely on individual resources to update us on the progress that was made?
I am confused.
Mon 1 Feb 2010, 16:16Trainer Andrew said...
RE: managing workloads using Project
Hi Piers
I'm sorry this seems to be proving difficult to pin down. How about trying it from a different direction?
Project has built in reports, one of which is the Todo list. You can access this from the Report menu then choose Reports... and double click on the Assignments group.
This shows activities broken down by week. To change the time interval to days go back to Report>Reports>Assignments then single click on Todo list before clicking on the Edit button.
Set the Period to days
As it stands the report will list, day by day what a particular resource has assigned to them.
Does this help at all?
Kind regards,
Andrew
Thu 25 Feb 2010, 10:14Delegate Piers said...
RE: managing workloads using Project
Hi Andrew and apologies for not getting back to you sooner, but no your latest suggestion doesn't work either, indeed its the other way round. Its not about a particular resource, its about picking a particular day and seeing what work tasks are scheduled for that day and therefore what resources are required.
So I have put this query back to unresolved and not because I feel that there has to be an answer, but because I am now utilising my company's Microsoft gold partner status to see if I can get any ideas from them and wanted to be able to keep you in the loop.
This is absolutely in no way a reflection of your abilities, indeed you have done everything and more to help. I suspect if neither of us can figure this out, then there isn't an answer to this, but thought it would be interesting to see if Microsoft can!
So speak soon hopefully
Kind regards
Piers
Mon 8 Mar 2010, 10:06Trainer Andrew said...
RE: managing workloads using Project
Hi Piers
Thanks for letting me know. I look forward to hearing any updates. It may also be I haven't quite understood what you are looking to see in the display.
Keep me posted and if I have another suggestion I will also add to this post.
Kind regards,
Andrew
Mon 8 Mar 2010, 10:28Delegate Piers said...
RE: managing workloads using Project
Thanks Andrew
The key word here was that of 'schedule' - what I was looking for was a list of scheduled work due today, as opposed to tasks that have simply started.
The example I found myself using was where an engineer goes to site on Day 1 to work on Task 1 for 1 day. However he is only able to get 80% of the work done and is already booked to do Task 2 on Day 2, so Task 1 is updated and accordingly split with 80% of the work assigned to Day 1 and the remaining 20% to be finished off on Day 3 when he is available again.
The report that I was needing was a list of scheduled work for a particular day ... so in this example, Day 2 would include Task 2 and its associated resources but NOT Task 1, because despite the fact that Task 1 has started, its not necessarily relevant to Day 2's proceedings.
Unfortunately though, Microsoft can't help. They believe this is possile either by using VBA or going to Project Server, but not with Professional out of the box, so that's that :)
So once again thank you for all your help with this and sorry it took up a lot of your time
Kind regards
Piers
Mon 8 Mar 2010, 10:40Trainer Andrew said...
RE: managing workloads using Project
Hi Piers
No problem and thank you for letting me know the outcome. Unfortunately it looks like there isn't a straightforward way of producing the information you are looking for.
I hope you find a solution that works for your organisation and do let us know if you have any further questions.
Kind regards,
Andrew
Mon 8 Feb 2010: Automatically marked as resolved.
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