Resource Leveling

[Tush Patel]

I have adjusted a resource's availablity to be 100% available in the months
of Nov and Dec (for instance) - yet Levelling is scheduling them for 200%
over Nov instead of 100% over both Nov and Dec. I'm leveling Day by Day - but
if I change this to Week by Week or Month by Month - it seems to resolve the
problem.

Anyone experienced this before / have any clues - it's an absolute road
block for me right now. Any views help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

 

[Steve House]

Project doesn't assign resource allocations, you do. And leveling doesn't
change the assignment levels once you have set them. If a resource has been
assigned to a task in excess of his maximum level, it's up to you to
manually correct it. Resource Joe has a maximum of 100%. If you have him
assigned at a total of 200% by virtue of being assigned to both Task A @
100% and Task B @ 100%, both tasks scheduled at the same time, leveling will
take one of them and move it out so it doesn't start until the other one is
finished, but that's all it does. If Joe is 200% ON A SINGLE TASK, leveling
will do nothing to fix it. If you assign him to a task @ 100% and then
later reduce his maximum availability to 50%, once again all that happens is
his name turns red; leveling does nothing to fix it because it never changes
assignment levels on individual tasks.

 

[Tush Patel]

Thanks Steve - although perhaps I haven't articulated the question properly.
I've added Joe to the resource sheet and made him available for November and
December. I've then allocated Jo to a number of individual tasks (at 100%)
that all start at the Project Start and those tasks sum to 2 months of
work-effort in total. I would then expect Resource levelling to schedule his
tasks throughout November and December, based on dependencies, priorities and
any other task constraints. Instead - it allocates all tasks in November -
showing that Joe is 200% allocated in November and 0% in December. The Plan's
quite big - maybe 1000 lines in length. I've levelled 100's of times before -
so don't think I've fundemantally structure the plan incorrectly. Just
wondered whether you had any clues as to why it was overallocating Joe in
November (200%) where we had spare capacity in December?

 

[Steve House]

I know you're looking at resource leveling but are you doing it by
explicitly running the Resource Leveling tool in the Tools menu? Project
doesn't redistribute the work until you tell it to do it. If you have run
it, was the checkbox "level only within available slack" turned off? Have
you entered any start or finish dates manually or otherwise set any
constraints on the tasks, especially any MFNLT constraints, that might
prevent their being moved? Has any actual work or progress information been
entered?

Whenb you said you made Joe available in Nov and Dec, how did you do that,
or rather how did you make him unavailable before Nov and after Dec?

 

[Tush Patel]

Thanks again for your response Steve. In answers to your questions:

Yes - to run levelling - I go to Tools / Level Resources / Level Now

The "level only within available slack" is turned off - althought to be
honest - I;m not entirely sure what the does / does not do - where do you
define your avaialble slack and how does this work?

I haven't hard coded any dates at all in the Plan - simply inserted tasks,
work effort, priotity and let Project schedule all tasks.

Yes the Project is in flight - so some of the task have been completed - but
none partially they are either 100% or 0% complete

With regards to Joe's working availability - I HAVE NOT touched his Project
Calandar (i.e. Tools / Change Working Time) - Instead I have double clicked
him in the View / Resource Sheet - and under Resource Availability inserted
From 02/11/2009 (because that's the Monday) To 31/12 /2009. My interpretation
is that MS Project would assume that he's not available any time before or
after these dates.

Hope that provides you with enough info to help provide some more guidance.

Regards
Tushar

 

[Mike Glen]

Hi Tush,

Please check Joe's availability. The wording of the availability data input
in the Resources Information dialog would require 2 entries eg:

From (some previous date) To 01/11/09 - 100% and then
From 01/01/2010 to (some future date) - 100%

ie he is not available between those 2 dates. That should fix it.

You might like to have a look at my series on Microsoft Project in the
TechTrax ezine, at this site: http://tinyurl.com/2xbhc or this:
http://pubs.logicalexpressions.com/Pub0009/LPMFrame.asp?CMD=ArticleSearch&AUTH=23
(Perhaps you'd care to rate the article before leaving the site,
Thanks.)

FAQs, companion products and other useful Project information can be seen at
this web address: <http://www.mvps.org/project/>

Hope this helps - please let us know how you get on

Mike Glen
MS Project MVP

 

[Steve House]

Once any progress is posted to a task the date that the task begins is fixed
in granite, as well as the date for any work that has been performed for a
task marked partially complete, and leveling won't move it. That MAY be a
partial reason for your issue.

Slack time is not input, it is computed. Simplified, it is the amount of
time a task could be delayed without delaying the end of the project.
Consider a set of 3 tasks, not linked together... A duration 2 days, B
duration 4 days, C duration 5 days. They all start on the project start
date. As it sits, the project finish is when task C finishes, 5 days out.
So task A COULD be delayed up to three days before it becomes the last task
to finish and takes over as the determiner of the project finish date. A is
said to have 3 days slack time. Similarly B has 1 day slack time for the
same reason. Now is you have all three of these tasks assigned 100% to the
same resource, he'll be over allocated. But the only way to resolve that
overallocation is to sequence these tasks and to do that, the finish date
must be allowed to move out into the future - regardless of the order of
tasks, doing them in sequence means the project duration must go from 5 days
to 10 days. But if "level within available slack" is turned on, the
leveling engine will abort as soon as the slack time is eaten up and the
finish date starts to move out from the original 5 days. The result will
not be a linear sequence bur rather A will pushback 3 days to start on day
4, B will pushback 1 day to start on day 2, and C will not move at all. The
tasks will remain in parallel and the resource will remain overallocated,
the only change being that the tasks now all finish together instead of
starting together and the resource overallocation is occuring at the end of
the week rather than at the start.