I don't know what you mean by a "real end date you can trust" <grin> The
reliability of its forecast is only as good as the validity of the model of
the project you have created. If you have accurately modeled the work
dependencies of the various tasks in the project and have accurately
estimated how the amount of work each task requires and the effort the
resources can put into them, then the predicted end date should be
reasonably accurate. But MSP is just a calculator to help you juggle all
the variables in your mind and its results are only as good as the inputs
you give it.
This thing of overallocations and resource leveling trips up a lot of people
because their expectations are unrealistic. Leveling is NOT resource
optimizing. All leveling will do is delay work to resolve what are
essentially double-bookings. If Joe is booked to Task A for 8 hours on
Monday and also booked to task B for 8 hours on Monday, he can't physically
do 16 man-hours of work over the course of 8 hours of duration. Something
has got to give. So leveling will move one of those tasks to Tuesday, all
other things being equal. And that is all it ever does. It will not take
Joe who is booked at 200% for 1 8-hour day and change his allocation to 100%
while extending the task to 2 days. It will not see that Joe is only booked
at 50% on a task when his maximum allwoed is 100% and so shorten the task by
increasing his assignment to 100%. All it does is delay some of the work
when Joe is scheduled to be in two or more different places at the same
time. The "Look For Overallocations on a ... (day-by-day, hour-by-hour,
etc) basis" setting is essentially your way of telling Project how big an
overlap has to be for it to to try to fix it.
--
Steve House [Project MVP]
MS Project Trainer & Consultant
Visit
http://www.mvps.org/project/faqs.htm for the FAQs
Anthony said:
Thanks for the quick response i am new at MS project i have been working
with
P3 the last 10 years and this is a little differnt. I think that if i
change
the setting to hour by hour it might cure the problem, will it still give
me
a real end date that i can trust.
Steve House said:
There are two things that can ause this. One is having overallocations
that
are less than the setting for "look for overallocations" in the leveling
dialog and the other is having resources assigned at greater than their
maximum allocation entry on a single task.
If Joe has a maximum availability of 100% and I've assigned him to a
sinlge
task at 200%, leveling will not resolve it.
If I have Joe assigned to 1 8 hour task on Monday at 100% and also a
second
1 hour meeting on Monday, also at 100%, and I level with the "Look for
overallocations" setting at the default "Day-by-Day" it won't fix it.
But
if I change the setting to "hour-by-hour" leveling will fix it.
HTH
--
Steve House [Project MVP]
MS Project Trainer & Consultant
Visit
http://www.mvps.org/project/faqs.htm for the FAQs
When i level my resouces with no end date on the project i still get
overallocated resouces even though the end date of the project is
pushing
out, what is this telling me, should'nt the project end date be pushing
out
far enough so that my resources level out. I have roughly 9000
activities
in
this project
