Today I gave an MPUG WebnLearn session and will point you to the slides and recording when it is made available (in a few days). For now, I wanted to post a few of the advantages of working with Shared Resources when using Project Standard or Project Professional (not connected to a Project Server).
You can use a resource pool to schedule the work of resources across multiple projects, identify conflicts between their assignments in different projects, and see how their time is allocated in each project.
The Advantages:
–Share Resources across multiple projects
–Centralizes resource information
–View resource allocation (and over allocation)
–Identify conflicts between their assignments in different projects
–Perform portfolio reporting across linked projects
Before a resource pool is used each project contains its own resources and you need to maintain those resources in each plan. Overlap
After a resource pool is created - resource information in each project comes from the single source -- your shared resource pool. Central Location
Notes on Resource Pools:
• If you open a project (Sharer File) that has a connected Shared Resource Pool you will be prompted to open the resource pool.
• If you have Read/Write access to the resource pool it will open otherwise it will open in Read-only mode.
Why is read/write access important when using Shared Resources and Sharer Files?
1.When you work with the Share File and have read/write access to the Resource Pool the updates will occur automatically.
2.You can also see the resources assignment on the other Shared projects.
Hope this helps.
-Jacques
