Fully Allocate a Resource

[Vic]

Hi,

I'm working in Project 2003 and I'm having an issue where it won't fully
allocate a resource who is assigned to a task at 100%. This is happening in
several instances where it only assigns someone for say 2 hrs per day
(instead of 8). Again they are 100% on the task and I can't find a valid
reason for this. I am using leveling as well on a Minute by Minute basis.

Any ideas?

 

[Gérard Ducouret]

Vic,

Are you sure that somebody did not enter a Work value for these tasks?
For example 20h of Work on a task, the Duration of which is 10d.
If you click Assign for a resource, Project calculate Units = 0.25 and the
work for each day is 2h.

Gérard Ducouret

 

[Vic]

Yes, I've been entering work values based on how much they've worked on a
task. That seems to be the tasks this happens with. So you're definitely on
to something . Thanks.

What should I be doing different or how can I adjust so it schedules the
remaining hours appropriately (ie. 8 hours per day)?

 

[Gérard Ducouret]

Vic,

If you want to enter work values based on how much they've worked on a task,
don't use the "Work" field but the "Actual Work" field.
Hope this helps,

Gérard Ducouret

 

[Vic]

Thanks.

Sorry, that's what I've been using, the Actual Work. On occasion I might
have entered something in the Work field to force a task to start earlier
(same resource working on two tasks but Project placed them in a different
sequence than I wanted).

Do you think this is caused if I entered something in Work field? Is there
a way to correct that?

 

[JulieS]

Hi Vic,

Pardon me for bumping in, but what time in the day does the task
begin? If the task doesn't begin at the start of the working day, I
wouldn't expect to get 8 hours of work in.

Also, you mention that you are using Resource Leveling on a minute
by minute basis. It's possible that in order to resolve
overallocation that the task has been split to allow other tasks to
be scheduled on that day.

I hope this helps. Let us know how you get along.

Julie
Project MVP

Visit http://project.mvps.org/ for the FAQs and additional
information about Microsoft Project

 

[Vic]

Hi Julie,

On the leveling I didn't allow splitting of a task. And I'm not sure how to
check the time of a task starting. Please let me know on that just out of
curiousity. But I don't believe that is it because it's many days and many
tasks that it happens.

I was able to resolve the problem by changing the Work Contour and
prioritizing some tasks. When I entered Actual Work it changed the Work
Contour from "Flat" to "Contour" - is that normal? So I changed them back to
Flat and in addition to the prioritization that seemed to start scheduling
the work so they had an 8 hour day (or at least close to it in some cases).

Hope that makes sense. While it seems to be corrected, I would still be
curious to know why it does that and if there's a better way to handle the
situation. Your help is appreciated.

 

[Dave]

You can make project display the start time by going to tools, options
and selecting the view tab. In the date format you can opt to show or
hide the time.

As a general observation, do you actually have to track what your
resources are doing minute by minute? That's a very fine level of
granularity. If you are only interested in ensuring that they get a
number of activities done in a day then I would suggest day-by-day
levelling or even week-by-week levelling might be more appropriate
although your particular circumstances may dictate otherwise.

I don't understand how what you have done has resolved the problem and
wonder whether you are expecting too much from the levelling engine.

Levelling is not an optimisation tool in that it won't adjust the work
to fill the gaps in a resource's working day. It actually does
something closer to the opposite - it simply delays tasks until there
are no overallocations in the resource's schedule.

If, after levelling, a resource is not working sufficiently many hours
in a day then you need to manually adjust the length of that task (and
possibly level again - you may find it useful to fix those elements of
the plan you are happy with by setting their priority to 1000).

You shouldn't have to adjust the contour and I wouldn't worry about it.
By definition, unless the resource works exactly the same number of
hours every day on a task then it is contoured. Instead, if I wasn't
happy with the hours that a resource had been scheduled to work then I
would alter that either by directly entering the planned hours or by
adjusting the length of the task, although when doing this you need to
consider the totality of hours worked by the resource across all the
tasks occurring on that day.

 

[JulieS]

Hi Vic,

It looks like Dave has handled a number of your questions -- Thanks
Dave.

Let us know if you have any additional questions.

Julie

 

[Vic]

Thanks. I can try to scale it back to day by day. I went minute by minute
to resolve some overallocation flags.

Yeah, I know the purpose of the leveling engine, but I do expect Project to
optimize people's days to a large extent. I can't tell you why the Work
Contour and prioritization worked, I was hoping you could . But it did
work. Maybe it was the prioritization.

I did try to manual schedule planned work, but that caused other problems (I
can't remember what they were now - probably over allocation based on what
you said). I can try that again and keep an eye on that.

Thanks for your help. And you too Julie

 

[JulieS]

You're welcome Vic. Glad to have helped and thanks for the
feedback.
Julie