Resource Levelling

[Jonathan]

Can you please explain the algorithym used by project for auto resource
levelling. Hopefully this will help in setting up tasks

 

[Haris Rashid]

hi Jonathan,

Microsoft Office Project 2003 levels overallocated resources by delaying and
splitting tasks, based on criteria you set. When you start the leveling
operation, Project checks each of the resources in turn. If a resource is
overallocated, Project searches for the tasks that are causing the
overallocation and identifies which of those tasks can be delayed. Project
does not delay tasks that have:

A constraint of Must Start On or Must Finish On.
A constraint of As Late As Possible, if this project is being scheduled from
the start date.
A constraint of As Soon As Possible, if this project is being scheduled from
the finish date.
A priority of 1000, meaning do not level.
An actual start date.

However, as long as the Leveling can create splits in remaining work check
box is selected, any remaining work can be split for leveling.
After determining which tasks can be delayed, Project picks the task to
delay based on its task dependencies, start date, priority, and constraints.

To review the changes leveling made to tasks, on the View menu, click More
Views. Click Leveling Gantt, and then click Apply. Review your tasks in the
Leveling Gantt view to see the results of leveling and to see how much delay
leveling has added to tasks.

Regards,

 

[Jan De Messemaeker]

Hi Haris,

Extremely clear!
Just to avoid some misunderstandings:

- What Haris said implies that Leveling does NOT, NEVER, change assignment
units.
- Standard priority also, and very prominently, takes into account Total
Slack
- Leveling Delay is a rather useless field because it only shows the delay
introduced to the task itself during the leveling exercise. When a task is
delayed bcause if the leveling delay of one of its predecessors, but not any
further, it will show a leveling delay of 0.
The fields to use to show leveling impact (I avoid the word delay on
purpose) are Preleveled start and preleveled finish. Mind you, they are only
accurate when between two lebvbveling ewercises you have done an explicit
clear leveling.
- A final word of advice. Just like you don't put in dates in stead of
relationships, and let Project do the calculation, do not do half of the
leveling work by hand by splitting your resourcces in fragments of 20%, 50%,
70% etc. When you do leveling will give far less convincing results. Do it
yourself or have Project do it, the combination is not always beautiful.



Hope this helps,