Leveling indicator not working for some resources

[Ken Greene]

About 40% of my overallocated enterprise resources do not display the
yellow diamond Leveling Indicator when they are obviously over
allocated on the time basis specified in the Resource Leveling dialog
box (e.g., more than 8 hours on a day-by day basis). The Leveling
Indicators on the other 60% of my enterprise resources behave as
expected, turning on and off as I change the leveling basis (e.g.,
between day-by-day and week-by-week).

Has anyone encountered this or does anyone know of any reason why the
indicator would not appear when it is supposed to? Even though these
resources appear in red as over allocated in the Resource Usage View,
Project Resource Leveling will ignore any resources that do not
display the leveling indicator. I wonder if this is a bug or if my
database could be corrupted?

Project Professional 2003 build 11.0.2003.0816.15

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Ken --

What you are seeing is the default behavior of the software regarding
overallocations and leveling. The yellow diamond indicator tells you which
resource overallocations you can level properly using the current
sensitivity setting. So, that means you can level the 60% using the current
sensitivity setting. To level the other 40%, you need to change the
sensitivity setting. So, no, this is definitely NOT a bug. The tool is
behaving as designed. Hope this helps.

 

[Ken Greene]

Dale,

Thanks for the reply. The problem is that the indicator does not
appear no matter what the sensitivity setting. For example, I have
John Smith scheduled for 10 hours a day and when I set the sensitivity
to day-by-day, the leveling indicator still does not turn on as it
should.

What I did to solve the problem is to create a new enterprise resource
(e.g., John Smith2), add him to the project (Build team from
enterprise), and then use Assign Resources to Replace John Smith with
John Smith2. Once I did this for all tasks in all projects to which
John Smith was assigned, I deleted the problem resource John Smith
from the enterprise resource pool and renamed John Smith2 back to John
Smith. Now the leveling indicators (and therefore the manual and
automatic leveling features) work as expected.

I can only conclude that somehow some of my enterprise resource
records got corrupted in the database in such a way that Project was
unable to recognize their overallocations on the selected (e.g., day-
by-day) basis. Deleting these resources and replacing them with newly
created resources seemed to fix the problem.

Ken Greene
Director of Program Management
SR Technologies, Inc.

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Ken --

The behavior you saw is one of the oddest things of which I have heard in
Project Server 2007. But I congratulate you, my friend, for solving this
problem. I agree with your assessment of the cause of the problem. And
thanks for sharing the solution with us!