Assigning a Resource to a Task: Introduction

Microsoft Project 2016 enables you to assign resources to tasks in a variety of ways. Resource assignments clarify responsibility for doing tasks and also help you to determine how long a task will take and how much it will cost.

This series will demonstrate how you can assign resources in various ways and avoid some overallocations, working with both local resources or those from the enterprise resource pool.  Read below for an introduction on how this works, or click on the appropriate post to follow the How-To guides:

Part 2: Assigning a Resource to a Task

Part 3: Replacing Resources on Task Assignments

Microsoft Project 2019 uses two different fields to express the allocation of a work resource: maximum units and assignment units. The maximum units field represent the amount of a resource’s time that is available to accomplish any project tasks during any time period. The default value is 100%, which can be thought of as one full-time equivalent of the resource for the number of project hours in a day (by default, 8).

The assignment units value indicate the allocation of a resource to a particular task assignment. A specific resource can work full time (100%) on one task or half-time (50%) on two tasks, and so on, before Microsoft Project flags that resource as overallocated. You can also specify assignment units for material resources to indicate the quantity of material being used for the assignment, even though there is no maximum units value available for material resources.

For a comprehensive coverage of all the features and functions of the Microsoft Project suite, our training guide is available to the public on Amazon.