Project Planning Resource Searches

Use the Project Planning Resource Search feature to help you plan and manage employee resources and labor functions.

In the Resource search, employee forecasts from all project plans are consolidated to determine current and potential utilization of each employee in the database. Non-project time is also assimilated using the general, non-project calendar that is synchronized with Microsoft Outlook. With data pulling from both the Project and General calendars, you are able to view a realistic future schedule and availability for each employee.

The Project Planning Resource Search functionality does not impact the Resource Management Utilization and Generic Assignment searches.

Named Resources, Generic Resources

After you analyze your plan, you can use Project Planning's Resource Search to search for employees with specific skills and other pertinent criteria. You must conduct an employee search before you can view the employee's utilization and schedule information to determine which employees are an appropriate "fit" for your criteria.

You may also want to assign some "generic" resources, or employee categories, to tasks or other WBS elements. For example, in the early stages of developing a plan you might assign three environmental geologists to a task, recognizing that you won't know exactly who will be available for the work until later.

Utilization, Employee Schedules

The utilization process within this feature searches the employee's activities, project calendar, or a combination or both to check the employee's availability. The employee schedule allows you to enter time scale information to check an employee's schedule.

Working Hours per Day

The number of working hours per day that Project Planning's Resource Search uses for a given employee is calculated by looking at both the working hours/day setting for the employee and the resource assignment data from the plan.

For example, assume you assign a resource to work on a task for 20 hours for the week:

  • If the resource works 8 hours/day, the utilization for the week is 50%.

  • If the resource works 4 hours/day, the utilization for the week is 100%.

To change an employee's working hours/day setting, change the entry in the Hours/Day field on the Personal tab of the Employee Info Center.

Hours Displaying in Red

If any resource is assigned to work more hours then he or she is supposed to be working — utilization is more than 100% — the number of hours displays in red. Hours displaying in blue indicate utilization of 100% or less.

Non-working Days

To determine which days are non-working days — for both resource utilization and employee schedules — Vision checks two settings in Holiday Configuration:

  • Non-working days (defaults are Saturday and Sunday)

  • Holiday dates

Related Topics:

  • Project Planning Named Resources
    You can search for resources based on criteria such as the employee's availability, skills, particular start and end dates, and even the calendar options you are searching for.
  • Employee Experience Information
    You can specify education, license, and skill data when using the Named Resources tab to search for employees. You must conduct an employee search before you can view the employee's utilization and schedule information to determine which employees are an appropriate fit for your criteria.
  • Project Planning Generic Resources
    Generic resources are labor category placeholders that represent resource assignments in a plan. Generic resources act as placeholders for actual people to be named later. You can use generic resources for summary-level plans or for plans intended to function as "what-if" scenarios.
  • Procedures
    You can search for generic and named resources in multiple ways.
Parent Topic: Project Planning Overview