课程: Project Management Foundations

How to assign resources to tasks

课程: Project Management Foundations

How to assign resources to tasks

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- [Narrator] Your project tasks are in sequence and you've estimated their durations. The final piece of your scheduling puzzle is how many people work on each task and when they're available. With that info, you can see how long tasks take and when they should occur. You assign resources only to work packages the lowest levels in your WBS because they represent work that must be done. Summary tasks roll up work from lower levels so you don't assign resources to these tasks. Milestones don't have duration so it doesn't make sense to assign resources to them either. What happens when you assign resources to work packages depends on whether you estimate task duration or work. Let's say you estimate duration and assign the number of resources you expect to get. Your scheduling tool will calculate the work those resources can perform in that duration. Let's say you're expecting two vendor resources full time to design scheduling features. The task duration estimate is two weeks. Two people working full time for two weeks is 160 hours. On the other hand, if you estimate work your scheduling tool uses the work estimate and the resource allocation to calculate the task duration. Some tasks don't get shorter no matter how many people you assign. Meetings are the classic example. A four hour meeting is four hours long. Whether three people attend or 10. When resources are available also affects when work occurs. For example, your schedule might show the equipment installation starting on November 9th. If your IT folks are wrapping up another installation and the team won't be available until November 18th, guess what? You have to delay that task in your schedule to when the resources are available. Don't forget to assign other types of resources you need like materials, equipment, and ancillary costs. With all resources assigned you finally get a good idea what the schedule looks like. To practice, work through the assignment exercise in the exercise files.

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