M
Mal Watts
All;
Can anyone help to explain the conditions under which levelling will, and
won't, operate, and when it stops due to overallocated resources, exactly
where it stops and why (and how to fix...)?
Problem: I'm a long-time but relatively unsophisticated MSP user (Project
2002), and the bane of my life at the moment is (lack of) project levelling.
I have a project with about 1000 tasks, 6 or 8 resources (actual people).
Some tasks have some actual data (ie have begun). The project has been
baselined. About 50% of tasks have resources assigned to them. The rest
are either summary tasks, or milestones for synchronisation, or tasks with
estimated duration but no resources, [used to show where actual tasks will
be done by others outside our team- so they have dependencies, but we don't
care who does them].
We've had a project hiatus, where for about 2 months people were re-assigned
to other things. Now the project is being re-started. So many tasks have
simply "slipped" by 2 months; I'd like to re-schedule them and re-baseline.
I have used Tools/Tracking/Update Projects, selected 'Reschedule uncompleted
work to start after...' and entered current date. (So far so good). As
expected, remaining work is rescheduled to start from today, with a
constraint of "start no earlier than". The project was initially defaulted
to "asap" constraint, effort-driven tasks, scheduled from start.
However... now all of the remaining tasks are scheduled to begin today...
and leveling won't work. WHY won't it work ? Leveling hour-by-hour,
'standard' settings, appears to do ... nothing. Not for any resources. I
get messages about unresolvable overallocations on already completed-tasks
(say, a particular day in Feb this year)... but I don't care about these
tasks. Skip... skip... skip ... then nothing. Usually, levelling takes a
few seconds, and I get the status bar to show progress. In this case, no
status bar is displayed (or gone too quickly for me to see).
Tasks which could be leveled (even within available slack) just by shifting
them are not shifted, and overallocations remain. It's as if levelling has
hit 2 or 3 unresolvable overallocations, then given up. And not just for
the overallocated resource, but for all resources. But I get no message
telling me why it stopped/failed.
Tearing my hair out... any ideas welcome. What are the conditions that
could stop levelling ?
Thanks,
Mal.
Can anyone help to explain the conditions under which levelling will, and
won't, operate, and when it stops due to overallocated resources, exactly
where it stops and why (and how to fix...)?
Problem: I'm a long-time but relatively unsophisticated MSP user (Project
2002), and the bane of my life at the moment is (lack of) project levelling.
I have a project with about 1000 tasks, 6 or 8 resources (actual people).
Some tasks have some actual data (ie have begun). The project has been
baselined. About 50% of tasks have resources assigned to them. The rest
are either summary tasks, or milestones for synchronisation, or tasks with
estimated duration but no resources, [used to show where actual tasks will
be done by others outside our team- so they have dependencies, but we don't
care who does them].
We've had a project hiatus, where for about 2 months people were re-assigned
to other things. Now the project is being re-started. So many tasks have
simply "slipped" by 2 months; I'd like to re-schedule them and re-baseline.
I have used Tools/Tracking/Update Projects, selected 'Reschedule uncompleted
work to start after...' and entered current date. (So far so good). As
expected, remaining work is rescheduled to start from today, with a
constraint of "start no earlier than". The project was initially defaulted
to "asap" constraint, effort-driven tasks, scheduled from start.
However... now all of the remaining tasks are scheduled to begin today...
and leveling won't work. WHY won't it work ? Leveling hour-by-hour,
'standard' settings, appears to do ... nothing. Not for any resources. I
get messages about unresolvable overallocations on already completed-tasks
(say, a particular day in Feb this year)... but I don't care about these
tasks. Skip... skip... skip ... then nothing. Usually, levelling takes a
few seconds, and I get the status bar to show progress. In this case, no
status bar is displayed (or gone too quickly for me to see).
Tasks which could be leveled (even within available slack) just by shifting
them are not shifted, and overallocations remain. It's as if levelling has
hit 2 or 3 unresolvable overallocations, then given up. And not just for
the overallocated resource, but for all resources. But I get no message
telling me why it stopped/failed.
Tearing my hair out... any ideas welcome. What are the conditions that
could stop levelling ?
Thanks,
Mal.