Resources, Continued

Let’s capture some rates for the USMNT, shall we?  The more experience a player has, the higher their rate.  If they have international experience then they can have an even higher rate.  Let’s plug these into our Resource Sheet in MS Project.  I also created a labor category based on their group (Mid3 is higher paid than a Mid2).

At this point, you would be able to assign these resources to a task (with their associated amount of work) and see what the total budget would be.  Notice anything different about the USMNT bus type compared to the rest of the team resources?

We’re not using the Material column b/c in this case…well, we can’t (b/c we’re using cost and work type resources instead of material).  If you try to enter something into that column you’re not able to type anything.  Why not?  Well, b/c the resource types that we’re using are Work and Cost.  If we were using a Material type then we could enter the measurement of how that material type is consumed.  If I had to think of something relevant we could probably use Team Uniform as a material type resource and then enter a measurement of an arbitrary number of shirts needed for each game.

Capturing Resources in MS Project

Alright…back to resources.

Let’s start off by talking about how we can capture resources.  Say you have a project coming up and you want to list all of the people that are going to be contributing to your project.  You might have a list of names, rates and other relevant information.  Where do you capture this in MS Project?

From the main screen, select the pull down menu from the Team Planner icon in the ribbon and select Resource Sheet.

Once you do that you get this blank view with what looks like a lot of information to fill in:

From here we can start to fill out the Resource Name column with resources that will be supporting our project.  Why don’t we make things more fun and have the United States Men’s National Team (USMNT) do all the work on this project.  At least, in this early state of planning, this is who we’re recommending to do the work.

Here’s the complete list.  All we’ve done is filled out the Resource Name column with our starting 11 (and a travel resource which we’ll talk about in the next post) as well as designated what group they’re associated with (forward, midfield, defense, goalkeeper or travel).  The remainder of the columns are auto-populated with this information below.

Now, if you already had a few tasks in the project, you could start assigning resources to those tasks by going to the Resource menu in the ribbon and  selecting the Assign Resources button (Alt + F10).