Scheduling remaining work results in unexpected result

[Chris W]

Hello,

We have a situation where a fixed unit task that will take 11.2 hours in
total is 44% complete (rem work = 7.2, duration = 18.29, utilisation @ 70%)

At this point the project was rescheduled and levelled which resulted in the
task being split and the remaining work resuming 10 days later.

We tried increasing the task priority to be the highest in the project and
re-levelling however this does not bring the task in. Checking resource
usage, the task itself shows 0 hours on each day until the 1st of May.

We can manually bring this in by dragging the task itself however id like to
follow the logic which is making Project calculate these dates. Any help will
be appreciated.

 

[Jan De Messemaeker]

Hello all,

Sent to Chris in reply to a mail he sent with the file attached:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hi Chris,

Before all, what you didn't tell, this is a published project from a Server
environment.
So unless you take an offline copy before leveling, that leveling will take
into account the resource load from the other published projects, which may
explain some of the "unexplainable" splits.
Moreover, that means I cannot be sure that what I test is identical to what
you see.

So, how some of the splits came about I can't retrace (probably through
other projects in the Server), anyhow, I can tell you what you can do to
avoid them in the future - at least in an isolated project

After eliminating the splits manually I can level and get the expected
results - at least the results I expect.
Are you aware that when you try to combine, in a day by day leveling, a 2%
task with a 70% task for a guy with 70% max units, Project has no other
option but to schedule these tasks one after the other?
Why not plan ordering hardware as a (say) 20 min task at 100% (which it is
in reality)?
Leveling is much better at that.

Attention also to 10% admin tasks - Mind you, after that R1 has only 60% of
capacity left so all R1 tasks may well be scheduled after the end of the
admin task!

Leveling never changes assignment units, it just delays tasks to avoid
overallocation; full stop.

If you want to keep these units as is, try leveling Week by Week which is
better at combining tasks like this.

Hope this helps,

 

[Chris W]

Hi Jan - Thanks for you response.

Yes you are right, the project was initially being ran from Project Server
however id saved it offline and attempted the levelling without the desired
result (after the splits were created).

The mystery that I am trying to understand is the 'spare' time the project
had before the remaining work on the 'testing' task was able to resume -
Shouldn’t levelling move the remaining portion of work back to start a.s.a.p.
rather than having that resource working on nothing for 10 days? (I am
talking in isolation, without eliminating the splits)

 

[Jan De Messemaeker]

Hi Chris,

Maybe just a detail but "Leveling" will never move tasks back but "Clear
Leveling" should.
As I said, I do not know why these splits "survived" a clear leveling.
Greetings,