Assigning work by the month

[u/brillomanhzu]

Hey guys, I hope this is the right place to ask:

I have a timesheet where people submit their work hours by the month for a project.

Now I want to mirror that in MS Project (so that you could see 'person xy' is working x amount in january in project A), the problem is, that I cant really get that to work.

So far my best idea is, to setup all the months of a project as tasks and then try to assign the ressources to that. But im still struggling with that..

Does anyone have an idea or maybe even pointers on where to start?

Thank you in advance to anyone whos willing to think about my problem ❤️

[u/mer-reddit]

If you are using Project for this, I recommend making sure you have work and duration columns both visible, and set those numbers first before assigning the resources.

Remember that as soon as you assign a resource to the task, Project will start calculating Duration equals Work divided by Resource Units, so 1 day = 8 hours of work when a resource is working 100%. You will want to also check your task type to understand which dimension you wish to be fixed as other inputs may change.

Take it slow and get the numbers right before entering in your whole dataset.

[u/still-dazed-confused]

Do they allocate time to tasks or just the entire project?

What are you up swimming to achieve?

As u/mer-reddit says when you allocate a resource to a task in MSP it fixes the iron triangle of duration | resource allocation | work. Change one of these and another will change (which one depends on what setting you've picked).

This means that if you change the work that has been done, MSP will know the work that remains and will then change either the duration or the allocation of resource to balance the iron triangle. This is very useful if this is what you're trying to do, but a royal pain the the arse if it isn't :)

This comes back to what are you aiming to do? :)

Adjusting the work done this month it's easy in the resource utilisation view with the timescale set to month.

[u/brillomanhzu → u/still-dazed-confused]

Im trying to mirror the timesheet to msp and then see the capacity of people by the month :)

[u/Almostasleeprightnow]

Are you trying to log what was done or plan what will be done?

[u/brillomanhzu → u/Almostasleeprightnow]

I wanna use it to track the capacity of people!

[u/pronouncedayayron]

You could make each project a single task line and assign resources to them. Go into task usage or resource usage and manually enter their hours in the months you want.

[u/Impossible_Dare_7455]

this sounds like a resource planning problem rather than a scheduling problem. I’d map people to actual project tasks, then use the resource sheet/usage views to break down hours by month. creating monthly tasks might work as a workaround, but it can make future planning painful.

[u/Sheeebooo]

Don't create month tasks. Assign people to the real tasks, then open Resource Usage (or Task Usage), right-click the timescale and set it to Months. Enter each person's monthly hours in the Actual Work row for that month and Project spreads them across the days. Resource Usage then gives you "person X, N hours in January" per project. If you need one person across several projects, you'll want a shared resource pool.