Our goal in resource planning and management is to understand the relationship between the resources we need – our requirements – and the resources we have – our availabilities.

We use the resulting information to level out resources as much as possible and make prioritization decisions where conflicts still exist. We make decisions on when, what and where resources will be applied.

We need to understand

• What kinds of resources we need.
• How many of each kind we need.
• And during what timeframes we need them.

Then we compare that to what we have to determine if we have all of the resources we need, when we need them.

Typically, the key resource on a project is people – what we call labor. Labor resources are managed in two ways:

• Generic – This is by skill or resource type, such as Analyst, Programmer, Technician, or even broken down into Senior Analyst, Junior Analyst, etc.
• Named – This is by specific individual, such as John Smith, or Karen Jones.

Often, both are used, with generics assigned early in the planning process and later replaced with named resources.

However, there are other types of resources that may be needed on tasks. These include equipment and material. We differentiate between equipment and material as follows:

• Equipment is “used” by a task and then is available for use by another task. In this way, labor and equipment are handled the same.
• Material is “used up” by a task and never available again.

We will be focusing on labor resources in this section, but will also describe how equipment and material resources are assigned.

Microsoft Project also includes the ability to define cost expense and cost budget resources. We will cover costs later in this Lesson.