Microsoft Project 2010: The Missing Manual

Chapter 8. Building a Team for Your Project

Without people, projects wouldn’t start and certainly wouldn’t finish. To keep projects running smoothly in between the start and finish, you need the right people, and they need to know the parts they play. Otherwise, collaboration and communication is like a rousing rendition of Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s On First?”

You can start building your project team once you’ve identified the project tasks. You analyze the work, identify the skills and other resources required, and then look for resources that are both suitable and available. After you’ve added your resources to Project, you can assign them to tasks to calculate the schedule and cost, and then track progress.

In this chapter, you’ll learn the difference between Project’s work, material, and cost resources, and when to use each one. You’ll learn how to identify and organize your resources (which may involve help from another program), enter resources in Project, and fill in fields for availability, costs, and so on.

Note

People are every project’s most important resource, and when this book says “resource,” that usually means “person.” However, projects also rely on help from nonhuman team members, such as equipment, materials, and training. In Project, work resources represent anything you assign by time—people, a conference room you reserve by the hour, or a paper shredder you rent by the day. Material resources come in other units, like gallons of gas or reams of paper. Cost resources ...