overallocated resource report

[lynne baker]

Hi
I'm running project pro 2002 and pwa
I would like to create a report where I can see the conflicting tasks
when a resource is overallocated.
I have been using the overallocated resource report, and sorting it by
date, or by ID (not sure if that means the resource ID or the task ID)
but it seems to ignore any kind of ordering!

I can of course see the clashes by printing out the gantt chart on A3
paper, but it's a bit of a waste.

We have the task durations set to fixed - and the manual levelling
seems also not to work so well.

My objective is to try to schedule 170 tasks without overallocation of
the resources, bearing in mind the fact that the task durations are
fixed, showing just long it's going to take to complete the project.

It's proving quite a struggle!

Many thanks for any advice/suggestions

lynne

 

[Steve House]

I can't imagine how 170 real world tasks could have fixed durations.
The duration is an estimate of how long it will take to do a task, not
how much time you have in which to get it done. Fixed duration means
the task will always take the same amount of time to complete regardless
of how many resources you have on it or how hard they work at it. So if
your task is to paint a wall or write a program, you are saying it will
take exactly the same time betweeen when work starts and when it's
complete whether you've got 1 or 20 painters, or the programmers work on
it 1 hour a day or 16??? Not very likely. That's not to say that some
tasks don't behave like that. But of the three task types - fixed
effort, fixed work, and fixed duration - I'd say fixed duration is the
least often appropriate.

It may not be possible to schedule within a fixed project duration
without creating overallocations. You say manual leveling doesn't work
well for you and that could be the reason - people can't be in two
places at once which is what an overallocation means you've scheduled
them to be. Joe is working on waxing widgets so he can't simultaneously
be painting the fids. If he's scheduled to do both during the same time
frame he's overallocated. You only have a few choices - you get someone
else to do one of the tasks , you delay one of them so it doesn't start
until the other is finished, or you add resources to both tasks so they
take less time and so can be scheduled sequentially without adding time
to the project. But with fixed duration you eliminated that third
possibility altogether while the second option, though keeping the
individual task durations constant, will add time to the overall project
schedule, something else you say you don't want.

Hope this helps - I know it didn't address the reporting issues but it
might help with the issues you hope to resolve using the report.