resourcing, Levelling applied to external contractors - best pract

[Chris Baker, Freelance Project Manager]

Summary - how if at all should I apply resourcing and levelling controls to
external contractors, when the problem of providing enough resource to meet
delivery dates is contractually theirs?

I am managing a project that uses some in-house staff and some companies who
are external contractors. Work moves back and forth between the two, as the
in-house staff check the work of the external contractors, and send it back
for any corrections. This obviously makes it important to keep a close eye on
over-allocation - if too much stuff comes into the in-house resources at
once, they will get swamped.

My project schedule currently has the external contractors as resources
allocated 100% to the project. Project thinks that each contracting company
is able to do one person-week of hours per week However, probably the number
of people the contractors will really allocate to their work will vary over
time.

At present, when I lvele the project i get very biazzare results, because
Project thinks (logically enough but not realistically, I hope) that the
external contractors will be over-allocated.

I don't think it will be useful to go into the work of asking the
contractors how many working hours they expect to be able to do at all the
points in the project - that would make my MS Project chart more accurate,
but to make this all accurate would involve a lot of work on everyone's part.
As far as I know, there is no way to have MS Project level one resource,
but allow others to remain over-allocated?

Is the best thing to do to remove the resourcing information from the
contractors' tasks and just make them tasks of fixed duration? Or is there a
better plan?


Thanks in advance for any help and ideas.

 

[JulieS]

Hi Chris,

My answers are embedded.

Summary - how if at all should I apply resourcing and levelling controls to
external contractors, when the problem of providing enough resource to meet
delivery dates is contractually theirs?

[Julie] I agree. If you are working with external contractors for a fixed
price, the details about resource loading are the contractor's concern and
wouldn't be something I would track in a detailed manner.

I am managing a project that uses some in-house staff and some companies who
are external contractors. Work moves back and forth between the two, as the
in-house staff check the work of the external contractors, and send it back
for any corrections. This obviously makes it important to keep a close eye on
over-allocation - if too much stuff comes into the in-house resources at
once, they will get swamped.

My project schedule currently has the external contractors as resources
allocated 100% to the project. Project thinks that each contracting company
is able to do one person-week of hours per week However, probably the number
of people the contractors will really allocate to their work will vary over
time.

At present, when I lvele the project i get very biazzare results, because
Project thinks (logically enough but not realistically, I hope) that the
external contractors will be over-allocated.

[Julie] You could resolve the problem with external contractor
overallocation by simply increasing the resources' maximum units to the
number needed. Go to the Resource Sheet, insert the Peak field (column) in
the table and increase the max. units to equal the Peak.

I don't think it will be useful to go into the work of asking the
contractors how many working hours they expect to be able to do at all the
points in the project - that would make my MS Project chart more accurate,
but to make this all accurate would involve a lot of work on everyone's part.
As far as I know, there is no way to have MS Project level one resource,
but allow others to remain over-allocated?

[Julie] If you use resource leveling from a resource view (Resource Usage
for example) you can select a single resource and when prompted by the
Resource Leveling command, choose "Selected Resource."

Is the best thing to do to remove the resourcing information from the
contractors' tasks and just make them tasks of fixed duration? Or is there a
better plan?


Thanks in advance for any help and ideas.

[Julie] - I hope this helps. Let us know how you get along.

Julie
Project MVP