Hi,

I have a question from my Blog reader:

“Hi Nenad and thank you very much for your blog. I have a question for you. Suppose you have a 10d task with a generic resource assigned to it ( total work 80h ). After 5 days you have to track the progress and enter these actuals: work done 48h, remaining again 48h and 2 resources to use in the second week.

What is the best way to manage this situation ?

Thank you”

OK, I will explain this, step by step with MS PROJECT 2016.

first I will create new Project with one single Task, duration = 10 days. As you can see from the question, this Task should last 10 days (2 weeks), so I have to make it Fixed Duration:

I will create three Resources: Generic Resource, John, and Mary. Notice that Generic Resource will have 200% Max Units (just for example):

Now, I will assign Generic Resource to the Task:

Now I will switch to Task Usage View:

I will adjust Timescale to weeks, so I can see work per week in the right part of the screen:

and:

and then:

and I will get (notice that I added Actual work to be displayed):

Now, due to example, my Generic Resource was working 48 hours at first week:

As you can see, when I put 48 hours in Actual Work field, and Work field is changed to 32 (80h of Total work – 48h Actual work = 32h). I will put 48 h in that field so I will get:

Now I am going to replace Generic Resource with John, and Mary:

and:

I will get:

As you can see, because I have two resources now, MS PROJECT calculates 48 hours for John (as a replacement for Generic Resource), and 40 hours for Mary (as a new added resource).

Now, since you know that you need 48 hours to finish that Task, you should assign proper work to each Resource. So, for this example, let’s say that both, John and Mary will 24 hours in the second week to finish that Task:

And now I get what I wanted.

It is a little bit complicated, but in a such a specific case, there is no other or “auto” way, to do that.

Hope this helps!

Regards!