Levelling bug in MS Project Professional 2002

[Tamara S]

On occassion, MS project will get stuck "Calculating" when I try to level
resources. It is not a lack of patience on my part - I once left it running
for an hour over lunch and it did not finish. If I don't kill the process
soon after it gets stuck, I can only recover by turning my laptop off - I
can't even shut down.

Is there a patch/workaround for this? Office Update tells me that I'm
completely up to date.

Regards,
Tamara

 

[Jan De Messemaeker]

Hi,

Avoid to assign resources to summary tasks - that is the worst
levelingkiller (if you also assign the same resource to a subtask)
Leveling may have problems with links TO finsh such as FF or SF but this
generally only results in low quality results, not in endless processing
But to be on the safe side, how many tasks are we talking about? Hundreds,
thousands, tens of thousands?

Hope this helps,

 

[Tamara S]

Hi Jan,

Thanks for the quick response.

I don't have any summary tasks with resources assigned and the project is
only 100 tasks.

All resources are defind within the project. All resources have
availability settings of less than 100%. Some resources have different
availability settings for certain date ranges.

The problem seems to happen when I change the completion date for one of our
external dependencies.

It doesn't happed all the time but once it starts happening, I usually have
to go back to an earlier version of the plan and start again. Restarting the
application or my laptop does not help.

Regards,
Tamara

 

[Jan De Messemaeker]

Hi Tamara,

I don't give up easily
So you have external dependencies, that complicates the thing.
When you say "the project" has 100 tasks does that apply to one project or
to all?
If the total is only 100 tasks couldi t be possible to send me all the files
and the resource pool?

Zip it all to jandemesATprom-ade.be

I can think of several items that can help (the contoured availability thing
may be a lead to explore - work of a resource is pushed into an area that
lastst till 2049 and has lower availability that the assignment units) but
not seeing the file leaves me guessing.

Greetings,