Hi,

I’ve got a question from one of my Blog readers: “When I assign Generic Resource to a Task and then replace it with human resource how can I decrease availability of generic Resource?”

I will show you that in MS PROJECT 2016! Suppose that we have a simple project with two Tasks:

We have John and Mary as resources, but we do not know who will work on which Tasks, so we create a Generic Resource with 200% Units (Because John has 100%, and Mary has 100% as well):

Now, because we do not know who will work on which Task, we will assign Generic resource to both Tasks:

If we have third Task on this Project at the same time as previous two, and if we assign Generic Resource to the that Task, Resource will be over allocated:

OK! Lets get back to our Project with Two Tasks. Now we are going to replace Generic Resource with John in Task 1, and with Mary in Task 2:

and we will get:

OK! Now suppose that we have on additional Task at the same time, and we assign Generic Resource to that Task:

As you can see, Generic Resource is NOT over allocated. Yes, you know that Generic Resource is Mary + John, and they are suppose to work from 23.11.2015 till 27.11.2015 on Task 1 and Task 2 respectively, but still Generic Resource in not over allocated because MS PROJECT does not know that Generic Resources is John + Mary.

What to do? Hard to tell. You can for example put Availability for Generic resource during the time like this:

and you will get:

or if only John works at that period on Task 1, and you did not assign Mary to the Task 2 you can decrease Availability for Generic Resource from 200% to 100% for that period, and after you assign Mary to the Task 2, decrease it to zero.

But it is a tricky and hard work, especially if you have project with many Tasks, and Many Generic Resources.

Regards!