Task leveling...

[Rick King]

I am new to project 2007 and am having some issues with resource leveling. I
am NOT using project server but do have a resource Pool set up that I am
using for a few projects.

The issue I am having is when I try and scheule a task that takes more hours
then there are in a single day ie 10 hours, and I level resouces it will push
the start date out to the first day where that resource has no other tasks
assigned.

example
resource has been allocated 2 hours of work per day on Monday-Thursday. I
then have a 10 hour task I want to assign the resource. I would like it it
automatically look at the availablilty and assign 6 hours of the task on
Monday and the remaining 4 on the Tuesday.

What is acutally happening is it wont start the task until Friday where will
will allocate 8 hours and then 2 hours on the following Monday. How can I get
project to recognize and use the 6 hours of available time on Monday-Thursday?

 

[Dave]

You need to adjust the length of the activity until the distribution of
the resource's work over time falls below 6 hours/day. It is a
fundamental feature of levelling that the resourcing algorithm does not
alter the distribution of work within a given task - rather it simply
delays it until it can be fitted in.

 

[Rick King]

Thanks Dave, that worked I was hoping for that project would automatically
adjust to that but I can see why you might not want it to. It would be a nice
option for a future release to be able to turn that feature on or off,
especially if you have a lot of smaller tasks that are less than a day that
need to be completed.

 

[Mike Glen]

Hi Rick,

Welcome to this Microsoft Project newsgroup

Why not tell Microsoft directly?
http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/project/default.aspx

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

 

[JulieS]

Hello Rick,

Pardon me for bumping in. You can have Project do what you suggest,
but it requires some manual work that may not in the long run be worth
the effort.

What I understand you wanting to do is to assign a resource to a 4 day
duration task, but only schedule two hours of work per day on those
four days. By default, if you assign a resource to a 4 day task (Task
A) and schedule only 2 hours of work per day, Project will spread the
8 hours of work evenly across the 4 days duration, assigning the
resource at 25% assignment level.

When you assign the same resource to another task (Task B) scheduled
for 10 hours of work in a 10 hour duration, Project will assign the
resource at 100% assignment units. The resource is overallocated
because his/her peak units (sum of assignment units) is 125%.

When you level the resource, project cannot drop the assignment unit
on Task B nor Task A below where you assigned them, so Project will
delay one of the tasks (Task B in your scenario) until the end of Task
A.

So, the work around is to force the 2 hours per day on Task A to occur
all at one time, with the assignment value at 100%. Then project can
schedule the remaining 6 hours per day with other tasks.

The easiest way I can think of is to create a task calendar with only
two hours per day as working time. (For example 08:00 to 10:00) After
adding the task calendar to the task, when you assign the resource,
you'll get the two hours per day, but at 100% assignment units.

You can then assign the same resource to Task B. If you then level,
Project will schedule work for the resource on the remaining 6 hours
per day on Task B. The resource will work 08:00 to 10:00 on Task A
for 4 days, and from 10:00 to 17:00 for Task B for day 1 and 10:00 to
15:00 on day 2.

I hope this helps. Let us know how you get along.

Julie
Project MVP

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