When you come in to work and find that you’re assigned to 14 new projects, it’s time for an employee availability chart.
Define Project Resource: a person or shared object committed to a project, such that it cannot be used on another project at the same time.
And… what’s an employee availability chart?
It’s a chart that shows bars for each week, telling how many hours an employee has available to them. On an empty week, you’d see a 40-hour bar. On a booked week, you’d see no bar. Or, on a partially booked week you might see a short bar.
Bars on the employee availability chart are based on project and task assignments. You may be assigned 25% of your daily hours on a certain project, and 75% on another. These would total up to 100% of your daily hours. Or, you might be assigned to certain tasks that fill up your day.
Before assigning resources to projects, it might be good to check their availability; they might be assigned to other projects that you didn’t know about.
To be fair, project resources can be more than just people. They can be equipment that is assigned to a project so that nobody else can use them at the same time. Any shared item or person can be a resource.