Balancing Resources with less than 100% in MS Project

[bauershias]

Hi everybody,

I am trying to do the following with MS Project 2000:

Task "Coaching" and "Work" are both handled by the Resource R1. As "Coaching" is a coaching task, R1 does not work with 100% on it. Instead, it is only assigned with 20% to this task. "Work" is a normal work task, R1 can work on with its remaining time (in my case the remaining 80% that are left).

If I define these both tasks and assign R1 with 20% to "Coaching" and with 100% to "Work" MS Project does not let "Work" begin before "Coaching" is finished, because it seems to wait until R1 is available to 100%.

What I wanted MS Project to do automatically is: Start "Work" in parallel and let R1 work with 80% on it until "Coaching" is finished. After that R1 should continue working to 100% on "Work".

Can this somehow be accomplished? If this is not automatically possible, I would have to split up "Work" and manually assign R1 to 80% on the first portion and 100% on the second one. It is the manual interaction I want to avoid!

Thanks a lot in advance.

--- Matthias

 

[PDQBach]

Ah, yes ... the old levelling issue. I could write books about this and barely scratch the surface.

First of all you want to allocate your resource to 120% of his (or her -- and if it's a "her" then she's probably a mother and 120% is quite reasonable) time.

If you want those tasks to run in parallel (with the resource working at 120%) then you can do this in a variety of ways. Here are two of them:

1. View | Resource sheet and set the resource's max units to 120%. The resource will always be overloaded -- but that may be the way your organization operates.

2. Instead of levelling on a day by day basis, click on Tools | Level Resources and select "month by month" as the levelling granularity. If you don't assign the resource more than 160 hours of work during the month then you won't see any impact on your schedule.

As for avoiding manual intervention -- that's the impossible dream. As a schedule maintainer you will spend significant time organizing tasks and resources manually (especially as the scheduled work and actual work diverge) to keep things in sync.

Why do all that work? Because tracking the actuals and readjusting based on the actuals is the easy part of the work; Project relieves you of the tedium of doing all the remaining calculations to determine the remaining start/finish dates of the incomplete or unstarted tasks.

 

[bauershias]

Thanks a lot for your quick answer, but I am afraid I did not describe precisely enough what I want to do:

I certainly do NOT want my resource to be overloaded. What I want is to let it operate with the exact capacity of 100% and make MS Project arrange the tasks appropriately in order to achieve this.

I am thinking of a concept of "idle tasks" that are used by MS Project to fill the remaining capacity of a resource to the maximum.

Again an example: Let's say my resource is a mother, then she is probably very well able of multitasking, i. e. she can work on multiple tasks at the same time, as long as the sum of units does not exceed 100% at any time. That is, she can certainly spend 2 hours a day, coaching a new team member and at the same time do some software programming for 6 hours.

As the new team member does only need to be coached for the first week, our mother can work 8 hours a day on the software programming task from the second week on.

In this scenario the software programming task is what I earlier called the "idle task": Work on it with up to x % of your working capacity (in our case x=100), if you can - if you have more important work to do (e. g. the coaching task), then work on it with only the remaining capacity. In our example she can only work with 80% of her capacity on the software programming task as long as she is coaching the new team member.

If MS Project supported a concept like this, it should be able to calculate the duration of the "idle task" from the (manually) specified amount of work and the automatically (by MS Project) calculated remaining capacity with which the resource can work on it.

Is this scenario so far fetched? I don't think so, because I am facing this situation in virtually all our projects: Do several things (mostly with a relatively small workload and short duration, e. g. coaching of new team members, subcontractor management, reviews, ...) in parallel and for the remaining time work on your main task. I would consider it a missing feature, if there was no way to handle these cases by MS Project automatically.

Thanks in advance for your answers.

--- Matthias

 

[PDQBach]

Well, MS Project doesn't support the construct you want. You have two choices: wish it was there; or suck it up and deal with it.

As I said, I could write a book about levelling. As I say elsewhere, I never let Project do my levelling, I do that myself.