Completed projects still report Remaining work and interfere with resource levelling

[jimbudde]

The following is posted on behalf of a coworker. If it's not clear, I
apologize.
I apologize in advance if this question has been asked before, but I
couldn't find it.

I am using Project Server and Project Professional 2003. The issue that
I am experiencing is "Remaining Work" shows up as incomplete in the
Resource Usage View on completed projects when viewed from a different
project.

For example, if project ABC is completed by marking all tasks within it
as 100% complete, then remaining work is displayed in the Resource
Usage View within Project ABC as zero. Project ABC is then Published
to update the server. When viewing project XYZ that are using
resources from Project ABC the resource levelling is showing resources
as over-allocated. Upon further investigation, it appears the
overallocation is coming from the fact that the server still has
Reamining Work assigned to these resources.

How can I correct this? How does this effect Resource Leveling, since
in at least one view, there is "Remaining Work." Would resource
levelling the completed project help to clear out any possible bad data
on the server?

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

jimbudde --

To level across multiple projects, you must open each project in which the
resource is overallocated. A better practice is to launch Microsoft Project
Professional, deselect the "Load summary resource assignments" option, and
then click the Connect button. When you open a project, you will not see
the resource assignments from any other projects, and you can then level
this one project without interferring information from other projects. Hope
this helps.

 

[jimbudde]

Dale,

I guess we need some clarification as to how exactly the resource
levelling works and how we think it should work. I can
understand/appreciate the need from a algorithm perspective that you'd
need to open each project up that you want to resource level across;
otherwise I could see this process taking an infinetly long time for
large enterprises, or even a few large projects with many resources.
After a project is levelled, the Project client appears to determine
over-allocated work based upon not only the project(s) that are open,
but also hours that are within Project Server. True or False? And for
clarification, which hours does it look at to determine overallocation?
Intuition tells us it should be Remaining Hours, not Work, but it
looks like it may be using the latter. Please clarify.

Thanks!

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

jimbudde --

Microsoft Project determines that a resource is overallocated when the %
Allocation for the resource exceeds the Unit Availabliity (Max. Units) for
the resource during any time period, from as small as a 15-minute time
period. You can see these two fields by adding them to the timephased grid
in the Resource Usage view. The simplest way to think of an overallocation
is when you assign more Work to the resource that the resource is capable of
performing during any time period, such as when you assign 24 hours of work
to a resource during a single day time period, or when you assign 30 minutes
of work during a 15-minute time period.

If you do not open all of the projects in which a resource is overallocated
in Project Server, then you will see misleading overallocation information.
That is why I recommend that you open all of them if you need to level
across multiple projects.

When you level overallocations using Microsoft Project's built-in leveling
tool, the software levels using one of two methods:

1. Delays tasks (or assignments)
2. Splits tasks (or assignments)

That is all the software is capable of doing. I can't possible teach you
everything you need to know about leveling in this newsgroup. The topic is
vast and complicated, with lots of possible nuances in the process. To show
you what I mean, our Advanced Microsoft Project 2003 course has a lesson on
resource overallocation and leveling that takes 2.5 - 3 hours to complete.
Hope this helps.