Resources Shown Overloaded are Not

I

ivan

I was wondering if anyone had experienced this situation.

We have a single server running Project Server 2002 and it
presently holds 8 projects. In these 8 projects we are
using the Enteprise Resource Pool for staffing purposes.

We have a situation where a single resource is a member of
two projects. When we open up projectA we see that on two
days this resource appears to be overloaded and the
overload appears to come from projectB. If we open up the
projectB file and look at this same timeperiod there is no
overload at all. If we look at projectA while we have
projectB open, the overload completely disappears. As
soon as we close down projectB, projectA once again
displays the overload.

As a final note, all of the assignments are in days, there
are no finer granulation of times so on the days that this
person appears overloaded, work shows as 2 days instead of
the 1 day you would expect. when we open up projectB, the
work reduces back to 1 day.

I have tried publishing all information and it does not
change the situation.

Any thoughts?

Thanks

Ivan
 
D

Dale Howard

Ivan --

If you apply the Resource Usage view with a single project open in an
enterprise environment, for some reason Microsoft Project shows resources as
overallocated, even if they are not. This occurs in a specific situation
when a resource has entered more than 8 hours of Actual Work in a single day
time period, or more than 40 hours of Actual Work in a single week time
period, and in a single project or across multiple projects. When this
situation occurs, opening the relevant projects causes the overallocation
(red formatting) to disppear for that resource.

To analyze this situation, I have applied the Actual Work field to the
timephased grid by right-clicking anywhere in the timephased grid (yellow
and white timesheet) and selecting Actual Work from the shortcut menu. When
I see Actual Work for the resource in excess of 8 hours in a day or 40 hours
in a week, with no additional scheduled work in the same time period, I
simply ignore the overallocation, as it is not worth the time and bother
trying to fix a problem that can't be fixed.

On the other hand, if I see the Work field in excess of 8 hours in a day or
40 hours in a week, with no Actual Work entered for the relevant time
periods, then that is an overallocation worth bothering with. So, yes, I
have seen what you have described, and to the best of my knowledge there is
no way to fix it. I can only recommend that you ignore the false
overallocations and focus on the legitimate overallocations that need your
attention. Hope this helps.
 
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