[gms]

As a new user, I have a perhaps naive question:
When creating resources, we can designate their availability up to 100% - ok - this person has 100% of their time available.

THEN, when assigning them to a task we can allocate up to 100% - so the resource allocation on a given task then reads as X% of X%

Are these relative or absolute? E.g., if it reads 50% of 50%, is it actually 25% of that individual's time? or are we to read it as "the whole 50% of this person's available 50%" (which I would interpret as 100% of 50%)

thanks
gms

[whpalmer4]

Originally Posted by gms

Are these relative or absolute? E.g., if it reads 50% of 50%, is it actually 25% of that individual's time? or are we to read it as "the whole 50% of this person's available 50%" (which I would interpret as 100% of 50%)

Some experimentation will help in coming to grips with this. The first experiment I would suggest is assigning 51% of 50% :-)

Yes, if you assign something as 50% of 50%, that means that the resource will spend half of its total time on that task ("the whole 50% of the available 50%"). 40% of 50% means that the resource will spend 40% of its time on that task.

The diagram below shows me working (100%) on a 4 hour task, which takes 4 hours. Tom, working 50% of his hours on this project, takes 6 elapsed hours to do a 3 hour duration task, flitting back and forth between the important stuff and reading the Omni Forums (not shown as the other 50%). When we are both free (and not before — an important thing to note about the scheduling algorithm), we start work on a project that requires 5 hours of effort. It takes us 4 hours, as I'm working 100% on it, and Tom is only putting in 25% of his total effort, so it takes him those same 4 hours to do an honest hour's work. Duration is 4 hours, effort is 5 hours.





Adding to the fun is the calendar for the resources. If Tom's calendar only shows him working 4 hours on this project instead of the default 8 when I made the screenshots, he would put in 4 hours the first day, and 2 hours the second day on that first task of his, and we would start work on the joint task partway through the second day. If you gave Tom another 25% of 50% task as Task 4, it would run concurrently with Task 3, and bring his utilization up to the full 50% of 50% while both were active.

If you still aren't confused, there's also an efficiency figure in the resource :-)

[gms]

Efficiency? no thanks, suitably confused for the moment. thanks for this - I'll noodle it thru.