Recently, there was a question on the Project Server Forum (Click here) about being able to “plan” allocations on projects that do not need/have a detailed schedule. Think of work like Support work, Unplanned work and so on.

The twist here was that, while the allocations were ‘planned’, it was also necessary to track actuals, without disturbing the ‘plan’.

First of all, I would recommend you to watch this video of the presentation (around 12 min mark) done by Project MVP Cindy Lewis at the Project Conference 2014, on using Resource Plans to plan operational work. What I intend to do in this blog post, is to take it one more step further and see how we can extend that technique into allowing the actuals to be tracked.

The standard way of planning Operational work is to create a schedule with ‘buckets’ of work, pre assigned to people, at certain %, so that that capacity is ‘reserved’ before ‘projects’ start consuming the capacity.  The Operational Plan will look something like this:

In the above example, you can see that the resources are reserved at 30% (or 20%) for the rest of the year, and other projects could be planned for the remaining availability (70%).

This technique works great until, resources start logging time against these tasks using Timesheets/Tasks in Project Server. Because the Actual Start/Actual Finish Dates could be different, the %work complete could be different than planned, these tasks start moving accordingly, thereby affecting the ‘planned’ allocation. Now the owner of the operational plan has to start ‘maintaining’ this plan to make sure that the allocations planned remain the way they should.

So, over time, after trying several approaches, I have come to the conclusion that this is not the most efficient technique to plan operational work (when you need actuals against those tasks). Using a Resource Plan is in my opinion.

The concept is simple. You build the Resource Plan for the project, as below and indicate the allocation you plan. ( Cindy’s video walks through the process of creating the Resource Plan).

Make sure the Resource Utilization is set to use the Resource Plan. So, once published this Resource Plan will indicate that the capacity is reserved for whatever hours that are shown above, for those resources.

Now here is the kicker. To track Actuals, here is what you do:

1. Open the corresponding schedule and add tasks (or buckets).
2. Add the resources to the team on the schedule.
3. You can assign resources or they can add these tasks to their timesheet, as long as they are part of the team
4. Important: Leave the resource utilization for this plan to ALWAYS be from Resource Plan.

So the schedule might look like this (It could be structured any way, does not matter).

If you are talking about ‘Unplanned’ work, the resources can actually request new tasks from timesheets/tasks as well.

The bottom line is that, with this approach, the resource utilization will ALWAYS show as indicated in the resource plan, no matter what happens with the Actuals.

And finally, a report could easily be developed to compare Resource Plan work with Actual Work, so that if somebody is spending way more time than planned on Operational Work, corrective steps could be taken.

This, I know will relieve the need for every day maintenance of these ‘operational’ plans  for the owners.