I think the bailiwick you're looking for is program management, rather than project management. Here's a scary product page from HP that seems to address this:
https://h10078.www1.hp.com/cda/hpms/display/main/hpms_content.jsp?zn=bto&cp=1-11-16-18^1313_4000_100__ I'm willing to bet that HP PPM is heinously expensive, and intended to be run by a cadre of certified PMPs. Some program management can be done by rolling up projects in the program portfolio as tasks in a higher-level project plan, and then using a project management tool to model the program. MS Project is actually pretty handy for this; it won't do automatic resource assignment, and absolutely won't go near "I have 10 more-or-less interchangable resources of this type, please assign them to tasks," but if you assign resources to tasks, it can show you when resources (actual people, rather than categories of people) are horrifically overloaded, and then you can tweak the calendar or staffing to reduce the load and view the result. I've often felt that task assignment should be part of what MS Project (or any of the project management tools) does, but I guess there's a complexity to the problem I've not grasped, so nobody has implemented it. Program management tools are probably not in the free-to-cheap category, but examining their features may give you ideas about how to approach the problem without laying out a fortune for a tool. Pete. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
