Ever wonder how Microsoft Project Server is calculating those Resource Availability numbers on the Requirements Details page in Portfolio Analysis? First make sure you have the Highlight Deficit checkbox selected. This highlights the months in red where you have deficits.
Let’s focus on the month of September and the role of Product Engineer. I scrolled down to Product Engineer because this was the first deficit I found.
At first glance I would think I need to hire 1 FTE (the value highlighted in red = .7 for this role and I can’t hire .7 people) for the month of September in order to be able to do all the projects I have selected for my portfolio. But this doesn’t make sense when I look at how many Product Engineers I have. I have five total so why can’t I do all the projects?
You need to go to Resource Center and view the Resource Availability for all the resources with that role to see the bigger picture. All the resources in my dev environment have a role so I can easily group my view by role and find the Product Engineers.
I have 5 Product Engineers and each one has a capacity of 176h for the month of September. My screenshot just shows Aaron above.
So for the month of September the capacity for Product Engineers = 5 X 176h = 880h
Next I need to add up the hours for other project consuming the resources during that month that are not in the portfolio. Which in the screenshot above is 120h rounded up. The other four resources not pictured plus Aaron total 580h.
Next add up the resource requirements for the projects that were selected. Since I selected the generic Product Engineer in my Resource Availability view I can see the hours in the Details table for the selected projects.
This totals 416
Add the hours from the projects selected + the hours from other projects not in the portfolio for that month. Again use the Details view on the Resource Availability view.
416 + 580 = 996
Total Capacity – total resource requirements for the month
880 – 996 = (116)
Now divide (116) by the capacity for the role for the month of September
(116)/176 = (.659)
That’s where the .7 comes from when calculating the resource deficit in Portfolio Analysis.
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