Remember that a resource is overallocated whenever the total assigned
percentage at any given instant exceeds his maximum allowed allocation.
Essentially it means that at at least one point in time, the resource is
expected to be in two places at once. "Overallocation" is not an average
usage, it is an instantaneous usage. Here's an example of what I mean ...
Barb's calendar says she works an 8 hour day and her maximum availability is
100%. So she can work up to 8 hours on Friday before being overallocated,
right? You would think so, but ... I assign her 100% to a 4 hour task on
Friday and also 100% to a second, 2-hour task, also on Friday, and that's
it, she's assigned to nothing else. She's allowed to work 8 hours, she's
booked for a total of 6 - I read that as a total of 75% usage and YET,
Project shows her in red, indicating she's overallocated. What gives?
Well, I left out a couple of critical pieces of data. It turns out the
4-hour task has a predecessor that's happening on Friday morning so Barb's
task starts at 1pm and runs until 5pm. Meanwhile, the other 2-hour task is
a staff meeting starting at 3pm that she must attend. So while she's only
booked for an aggregate of 6 hours during the day, and is able to work 8,
from 3pm until 5pm she's expected to be both at the meeting and working on
her task, to be in two places at once. Somehow during the 2-hour time
period between 3 and 5 pm, she's magically expected to produce 4 hours of
work, an assignment load for those two hours of 200%. Can't be done and so
she's overallocated. A resource is considered overallocated when such a
conflict exists for even 1 minute anywhere in the project where the total of
the assignment percentages on each overlapping task exceed the maximum
availability defined for that resource. So how can resource leveling help
us? Well, Barb must be at that meeting so it has a higher priority than the
other task and we set its task priority accordingly (bigger number on the
meeting than on the other task), then we resource level looking for
overallocations hour-by-hour and with task splitting allowed. Now the
schedule shows her on the first task from 1 until 3, then it stops for two
hours while she goes to the meeting, then it picks up again when she returns
to work on Monday and finishes Monday at 10am - she's no longer
overallocated and the schedule represents an effective model of what she's
really going to physically be doing.
For the life of me I can't see how Max Units equates to billable percentage.
It may take one of your resources 8 hours to do something that for whatever
reason you choose to only bill the client for 4 hours work. But your
internal cost is still 8 hours of the resource's wages and if he works an 8
hour day, it's 100% usage, not 50%, because he has spent 100% of his workday
actively involved in that task and has had no time left to do other things.
Assignment units is the percentage of the time spent on the task that is
translated into useful work output - in a manner of speaking it represents
the rate at which work WILL get done compared the rate it COULD get done if
the resource had nothing else to do but that one task.
HTH
--
Steve House [MVP]
MS Project Trainer & Consultant
Visit
http://www.mvps.org/project/faqs.htm for the FAQs
Barb PMO said:
Thank you for your humble opinion â?" I really appreciate it! Perhaps it
will
help if I explain the type of work we do. We sell consulting projects to
clients. We set up the project to estimate cost and to set up a proposed
work
schedule during the sales phase. When the deal is sold, we use it to
monitor
the progress. Each project consists of 10 â?" 20 documents (each is
scheduled
as a task) and then there are some tasks (bucket of hours budgeted for
consulting, management as well as a change budget.
Project helps us schedule the task when resources are available and
secondly
according to the clients ability to receive, review and schedule the
changes
we have recommended. Once a task starts we can usually deliver it early,
but
the successor usually has to wait until the original planned date because
of
our contract and the clients inability to handle things any quicker.
Project
does an decent job of planning and scheduling this work as well as
provides a
way (PWA timesheets) to update the actual work and the estimates of
remaining
work.
We created some reports in portfolio analyzer that show the work and
actual
work to help with capacity planning. This really helps HR and accounting,
and
IMHO, the data is there so why not use it?
I like to think that the Max. units (the hours a resource is available to
work on projects or the billable percentage) will help us by showing the
over-allocations. I am curious to know why project shows most resources as
over-allocated, yet we know our capacity is 1000 hours, the scheduled work
is
800, and the actual work is 900. Iâ?Tm afraid to level because Iâ?Tve
heard so
many horror stories. So we plug along and hope for the best!
--
Barb PMO
Steve House said:
I can't help wondering why all these calculations of billable time and
adjustments for efficiency, etc, are even necessary at all. IMHO, the
basic
purpose of MS Project is to answer the question "I have 100 widgets to
produce. I requires 10 differnt steps and I have Bill, Joe, and Bev
available to work on them. When will they be ready to deliver to the
customer?" I could care less if Bill is 100% efficient or 25% efficient,
all I care about is if he starts Monday at 8am, when will he dump a pile
of
100 widgets on the loading dock for shipping. I don't think of Project
as a
productivity management tool - that's something for HR to worry about.
It's
absolutely not a time and billing application and billable versus
non-billable time considerations simply don't apply. What it is is a
work
scheduling tool, a direct-cost estimating tool, and a progress monitoring
tool for closed-ended projects directed towards a specific, concrete
result.
When you leave the realms for which it was designed, it's like opening
paint
cans with an axe - sort of works but it makes a mess. Leave worker
efficiency estimates, billable and non-billable time management, worker
time
and billing, and profit/loss to the Human Resources and Accounting people
and their purpose-built applications where it belongs - IMHO Project is
not
the best tool to use for those particular functions.
--
Steve House [MVP]
MS Project Trainer & Consultant
Visit
http://www.mvps.org/project/faqs.htm for the FAQs
Barb PMO said:
A previous excellent post about Best Practices: Hours per day, got me
thinking about how I have my projects set up.
Resources: We have 20 resources who each have various billable
productivity
goals. These goals are expressed as a percentage (ex. 52%) and that is
entered in each persons Enterprise Resource Information view (and to
keep
it
simple we only use one time period for resource availability).
At 40 hours a week and 52 weeks there are 2,080 hours a person could
work
in
a year. A best practice, very mature company with well established
process
and procedures knows the most billable time they can expect from people
on
a
40 hour week is 1,664 hours per year (assuming 80% productivity) or 32
hours
a week. We don't consider ourselves very mature (yet!) so we are
budgeting
and planning based on a 1080 hours (assuming and average of 52%
productivity
for resources).
Therefore, I have set the enterprise options "hours per week" to 20.80
hrs
(4.16 hrs a day).
Steve House [Project MVP] wrote in that previous best practice post,
"Remember that the basic purpose of the "hours per day" setting is to
set
a
conversion factor for your duration entries."
His comment made me wonder if I have over allocated my resources (and
believe me they always show over allocated) un-intentionally? and if
that
is
the case, should I set the hours per week back to 40? and if so, will
that
automatically adjust the 20 projects I already have on the go, or will
it
just affect new projects?
