task and resources

[Claudia]

Hello, would you please help me with this problem?........i would like to
know what is the best and fastest way to resolve this scenario without
afecting the project plan....

I have a master with all the projects that the department handles and there
is a repetitve task call MRD that is the predecesor of all other tasks..we
have diferent ppl working at the same time reviewing this document and it is
posted as let's say 1 week for completion....so that means that i have
overlocated at least 10 ppl because they are reviewing 10 different MRDs the
same week....what's the best way to resolve this?

Thansk for the help!!

 

[Mike Glen]

Hi Claudia,

Welcome to this Microsoft Project newsgroup

I can't quite grasp what you're after. If you have overallocation then you
need to level. If you don't like levelling, then you're stuck with
overallocation or lots of overtime!

FAQs, companion products and other useful Project information can be seen at
this web address: http://project.mvps.org/faqs.htm

Hope this helps - please let us know how you get on

Mike Glen
MS Project MVP
See http://tinyurl.com/2xbhc for Project Tutorials

 

[Claudia]

Thanks for the welcoming and the response Mike!!

My manager doesn't want to do the leveling because he says that it makes the
project longer that it should be and I am proposing to use the resource usage
sheet to give each resource the actual ( or expected) time he/she will spend
in that task so it will free time and they will not be overbooked ..He said
that if we have 30 lines with the same task ( MRD review) and 10 ppl for each
line it will take us forever to do it and that it should be a better way to
do this without having to delay the task in one or 2 days... i also was
wondering if you can use task split and assign different ppl to each split
without having any time gap.....

 

[Dave]

This still isn't entirely clear unfortunately.

If you have 30 projects each with its own unique MRD to review and the
same 10 people are assigned to review each of them, then your plan
should show that.

You say that you are planning that each of these should be completed
within a week and I infer that the work required is actually less than 1
week. So your plan should show the amount of time that you estimate is
required to complete the work (I would actually use the Task Entry form
but that is up to you). You can also edit the profile of their effort
on the task (so they could work 100% until it is finished or they could
spread their effort over the week).

If you level with the "Levelling can adjust individual assignments"
selected,then the levelling function will move individuals around
independently of each other so that they aren't tied together when the
conduct the reviews and that is probably a reasonable model.

At the end of the day, if you have 30 projects each requiring 2 days of
review effort then that is 12 weeks per person in review or 120 man
weeks overall which is a substantial amount of work. So these
activities can't be completed in less than 12 weeks (if the effort per
review is 2 days). Are you sure that your boss isn't in ostrich mode
with head in sand and refusing to accept reality?

Project of course will not optimise the schedule and you may find that
you have to iterate the levelling process and adjust resource
assignments several times to get a reasonable schedule.