Project and leveling

[Bonnie]

I have a question about leveling. Here is the situation:

I have two tasks, one that I would like the person to work on 50% a day for
2 days and the other is an 8 hour task that needs to fill in the rest of the
time. If I ...
1. enter the two tasks in project - assigned to a person to start on the
same day (both 8 hour tasks)
2. set the task type to fixed work (task type does not even seem to matter
with leveling)
3. Put the resource for the 1st task at 50% which spreads the task out over
2 days.
4. Hit leveling (Level now) allowing splits, etc. Project does not
effectively level the tasks and you get an overallocation of hours (12) on
the second day.
5. Could someone explain how to set the tasks up so this does not happen? In
many cases you may have a person who devotes 20% of there time a day to a
specific task and the remainder of time is for other things. Leveling does
not appear to spread the other hours appropriately.

 

[Jan De Messemaeker]

Hi Bonnie,

Leveling NEVER changes assignment units of a task, so yes it will not
(readily) resolve the problem you mention..
For most problems assign reesources 100% to atasks and let leveling sequence
them: you will have a very accurate estimate of the end date (splitting
resources into pieces does not make total work go faster, to the contrary)
And if a resoruce is busy 20% all of the time on one task, indeed you should
assign her to the other tasks only 80%.
Hope this helps,

 

[philarruda]

Bonnie,

The solution to your problem is by changing the option "Look for
overallocations on a "Day by Day" basis to . ."Hour by Hour" basis.
According to your how you explained the problem; MS Project (MSP) is a pure
logic based program. As you discussed, MS Project is trying to resolve the
problem by 'looking at Days,' there are 8 working hours in a day MSP
evaluated if it could resolve the problem of work, comparing 4 hours on one
task and 8 hourcs on another. Since there were no solution (according to
MSP, MSP looked at each tasks in days) thus the solution of dropping the
remaining 'day' on the next task. (that would depend on the selection of
options that were loaded during the leveling.