Hi,

today I will show you how to deal with a problem which you will face, almost, in every Project. And that is: “Resources which are leaving Project, and coming back after some time to perform the same Task!”.

Let’s begin. First I will crate very simple Project with one and only Task:

and I will have three resources available:

I will Assign John and Mary to the Task:

As you’ve noticed I am using Task Usage View. Now let’s say that both, John and Mary finished they work ant Monday and Tuesday, e.g. they are 50% done:

Now we get:

Now, let’s say that for some reason Mary isn’t available for the Task. And we do not know if she will be back or not. And we need another person to replace her (we cannot assign rest of the work to John). We will put Tim on the Task:

Now we get:

At Wednesday John and Tim were working 8 hours and the Task is now 75% finished. When I mark it as 75% completed, I will get:

TADAAAAAA! Mary is back. So, now we want to replace her with Tim. and we will get:

Now what? The real life situation is that Mary WILL finish the job at Thursday (instead of Tim), but we cannot replace Tim with her anymore, because she is almost assigned.

Well we can. First of all We are going to modify Mary’s calendar:

So, Tip #1: Put exceptions for resource for period in which he or she is not available.

Now, let’s use Task Form, and edit workload for Mary and Tim.

Mary will finish her Task at Thursday, 15.08.2019, and Tim has already finished his work at Wednesday, 14.08.2019. In total Mary will work 24 hours (8 at Monday, 8 at Tuesday, and 8 at Thursday), and Tim will work 8 hours at Wednesday:

The result is:

This is what we wanted!

Tip #2: Use Task Form, and align the real life situation with finish date!

This is real life situation when you cannot predict if and when your resources will be unavailable, and then again available.

Regards!