Resources Leveling is a tool in MS Project to help you resolve situations
where you have booked your resources to do more work in a given period of
time than they are physically capable of doing. You have assigned Joe
Resource to spend 8 hours on Monday waxing widgets. But you have ALSO
assigned him to spend 8 hours on Monday polishing fids! Since he only works
8 hours per day, it's obviously impossible for him to do that work as
assigned. You have scheduled him to somehow magically produce 16 man-hours
worth of work output during the 8 hours of clock time that he is on the job,
ie, he is overallocated with a 200% peak usage. Now you run resource
leveling - the leveling process sees that problem and will resolve it by
delaying the work on one of those tasks until Joe has 8 (working time) hours
free, rescheduling the work to occur later than you originally assigned it
and thus resolving the Monday's double booking problem. If he was double
booked on Monday and free the rest of the week, leveling will move one of
those tasks to Tuesday. It will NOT see if you have underused him at any
point and move tasks back to fill the gaps. It will assume that whatever %
you assigned him you had a reason to do it that way so it will also never
change the percentages - it won't take a 100% assignment and reduce it to
50% while doubling the time. That means if you have accidently assigned
someone on a single task at MORE than the maximum allowed for the resource -
assigned someone with a maximum of 50% to a task at 100% (or what often
happens, the resource starts out with 100% max availability but after they
have been assigned to a number of tasks at 100%, the PM changes their max
available to 50% - now they're suddenly overallocated) or assigned someone
with a maximum of 100% to a task at a level of 110% ( despite what those
bank ads claim about their employees giving 110% it can't be done) leveling
can't fix it because it never changes assigned percentages and you have to
set it right by hand.
HTH
