Overallocation Rules

[Al]

What are the guidelines/rules/calculations for determining if resources are
overallocated? Sometimes you see an overallocation by day when the hours are
4 on one day and then on the next day a 6 hour daily allocation is not shown
as overallocted.
Can you change the allocation process to use remaining work rather than work?

 

[Jan De Messemaeker]

Hi,

A resource is shown in red ("overallocated") when during at least one minute
in the project its work (planned plus actual) exceeds its work capacity.
So a resoruce can heve only 2 minutes of work on a day and still be
overallocated if these two minutes are to be performed in one minute.
After all, if you are booked for two one hour meetings tomorrow, both at
9:00 am, even if you dont have any other work planned, you do have a
problem...

Hope this helps,

 

[johnson]

Al,
I follow the following rule for resolving overallocation problems. This
logic has to be applied manually as MS project does not have the capablity.--
Johnson

 

[Steve House [MVP]]

Putting in in plain language, an overallocation means the resource at some
point is booked to be in two different places at the same time. I have
Alice who works 8 hours a day and has a maximum allocation of 100%. On
Friday she's booked for a 2 hour meeting and also for a 4 hour video shoot.
She's booked a total of 6 hours. She works 8 and a max allocation of 100
means she's allowed to work 8, yet she shows overallocated in my project
plan. How can that be? 6/8 is 75% and she's allowed 100%! The answer is
the staff meeting is scheduled from 8 to 10 am while the video shoot is
scheduled from 8am to 12noon. She's double booked between 8am and 10am,
expected to simultaneously be in the staff meeting and on the video
soundstage. In those 2 hours she's somehow expected to do a total of 4
hours of work, physically impossible and an allocation for that time period
of 200%. She's overallocated. Resource leveling then must do one of two
things - either move the meeting to the afternoon or leave the meeting first
thing in the morning and delay the start of the shoot until after the
meeting ends at 10am. Doing either one resolves the overallocation.