Resource Utilisation Report

I have been asked so many times to develop/configure a resource Utilisation report that would be simple, easy to read by users and accurate. 

 Although Project Server comes with a nice graphical (and tabular) view of resource availably and Utilisation through Project Web Application (PWA) – “Resource Availability” , like the graph below:

I find that Microsoft Project Professional can really provide users with very useful, accurate, simple to read resource Utilisation information through just a bit of configurations to its “Resource Usage View”, like the following configured view:

It’s very simple yet visually very easy to read. From right hand side it just a list of Resources grouped by –in this case- Team Name, then on your right hand it’s your time phased Utilisation data in Unit%, where your blue line(s) represents the Availability of the resources (again in Unit%) and your white line your resources Utilisation or “Peak Units” (across all the projects in Project Server). The red format of the “Peak Units” means simply that the “Peak Units” has exceeded the Availability. Furthermore you can actually expand the projects under each resource to see where this Utilisation (i.e. Peak Units) is coming from, like this:

 Now how do you configure this view:

1. Start a new Project
2. Add the resources required to it (from Build Team from Enterprise)
3. Save the Project
4. Go to view “Resource Usage”
5. Right click on the right hand grid, then choose “Detail Styles”
6. From there you can remove (or keep) [Work], but most importantly you should add [Unit Availability] and [Peak Units]
7. You can change the colours of your lines from the same dialog box

If you wanted to group the resources (like the screen shot above) by a certain field, you can do so, by going to Group, Create New Group and Then Choose the Field that you are grouping with…..