How to calculate overallocation by week?

[cbwerner]

My MEP engineering design firm is trying to use Project for resource planning on design project in a pretty simple fashion. We plan activities weekly, rather than daily, so want to enter the data that way as well. The problem we are having is that once you assign more than 8 hours of tasks to a resource, it indicates overallocation in red. What I think it is doing is dumping all the hours onto one day even though we've changed the timeline to a week period.

How can I prevent overallocation warnings from showing until 40 hours in a week are exceeded? Thanks.

Chris

 

[PDQBach]

I just finished doing a simple test and only saw overallocations when more than 40 hours per week were assigned. You're obviously trying to force project to do something in a very strange, roundabout way.

Start with a blank project schedule.

Tools | Options | Schedule-tab and indicate that Work is entered in Weeks.

View | Resources and enter your resources.

Viet | Gantt and enter your tasks. For durations use 1w, 2w, 3w, etc. For Work enter 1w, 2w, 3w, etc. You are, of course, not entering Start or Finish dates and you are, (again) of course, letting Project calculate Start and Finish dates based on durations and predecessor/successor linkages.

Assign resources.

View | Resource Sheet (or View | Resource Usage). Set the timescale to weeks and you should be fine.

Remember, too, that items in red are only "sort of" overallocated. If you assign someone a 1 hour task on Monday and assign that same person another 1 hour task on Monday, Project assumes both tasks start at 8:00am and shows that person overallocated.

By carefully structuring your schedule with predecessors and successors you can eliminate those "false positives".

If you insist on entering Start and Finish dates then you'll have to manually enter the Start and Finish times, too.

You can also eliminate them by levelling (but that should only be done when you fully understand how levelling works).