Microsoft® Office Project 2007 All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies®

Chapter 3. Assigning Resources to Tasks

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✓	Locating just the right resource
✓	Assigning resources to tasks
✓	Choosing the percentage of availability
✓	Applying a contour setting
✓	Creating a resource pool
✓	Modifying resource working time
✓	Communicating assignments to your team

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So you’ve created dozens of resources available to work on your project. Now you must find the right resources for each task and assign them. It’s important that you understand how to make those assignments and how they affect the timing of tasks and ultimately your entire project.

Sometimes you need to finesse resource assignments to make them work. For example, you might find that assigning resources as groups rather than one by one saves you time. In other cases, you might want to tell Project when resources put in different amounts of effort over the life of a task to avoid resource overallocations. Finally, you might need to modify the time that a resource puts in on any task.

In this chapter, you discover the vagaries of assigning resources to tasks, and even how to let your resources know their assignments.

Locating the Right Resource for the Job

If you were coaching a basketball team, you probably wouldn’t bring in just anybody in the fourth quarter with one minute to go to sink the winning basket. It has to be Reggie or nobody. In projects, sometimes the same principle is true, and you have to have a specific person for a task.

However, if just about anybody with a ...