Resource Usage View

[Mark2]

I have assigned resources work at all task levels, as appropriate, making
sure that I have not double counted their effort. I pull up the Resource
Usage View, and look at work and overallocation "buckets", I have resources
that are shown to be overallocated but the work detail does not support the
overallocation. In investigating the problem, I found that the cases where I
assigned resources to a rollup task no work is being shown, and the task
itself is not showing up on the list. I have looked a variety of other
reports and views, and the resource allocation of work for the rollup tasks
does show up in them ... this a "design feature", defect, or is there a
configuration setting that I am unaware of in the application?

 

[Steve House [MVP]]

Overallocation occurs whenever the resource is booked at any instant to more
than his maximum allowed allocation, even if the total work is within thta
limit. If I have Joe with a max allocation of 100% who works an 8-hour day,
I'm allowed to book him for 8 hours in a day. But I'm also allowed a
maximum of 4 hours during half a day or 1 hour during an given hour of the
day. So I book him to 2 1-hour tasks during a day and that's it. He's
allowed to work 8 hours, he's only booked 2 hours, and yet Project shows him
overallocated ... how come? Because both of theose two 1-hour tasks happen
to be taking place during the same time period, say, 8am to 9am. Even
though he's only booked to do 2 man-hours of work that day, he's expected to
somehow do BOTH hours of work of them simultaneously during the same 1-hour
time period, a physical impossibility. One of those tasks will have to
shift in time so he's working on Task 1 from 8am to 9am and Task 2 from 9am
to 10am.

Summary tasks, your "rollup tasks," should never, ever, under any
circumstances, have resources assigned to them. Tasks represent physical
activity done by a resource or resources but a rollup does not represent a
single physical activity. Indeed it isn't an activity at all. Instead it
is simply a reporting artifact summarizing the various metrics of its
performance work packages, a grouping of the real work packages inserted for
the convenience of summing the schedule, work, and budget by deliverable.
All of the work is in the subtasks. You should be able to remove all the
summary task rows, leaving all the subtasks of course, from the project plan
and still get ALL the work of the project scheduled and accounted for.