Resource usage (over allocation)

[alcri]

I am working with a resource pool and viewing the Resource Usage across all projects. For some resources the total hours Work are shown in red. I am confused because I though that only for over allocated resources the hours would show in red. However that is not the case. Unfortunately the Help file does not help pinpoint the problem.

I have a few scenarios happening when I view the hours per week:

• People with 20 hrs assigned to different projects ( where the hours for the subprojects are the default black)

• People with as few as 2 hrs ( where one of the subproject taks is 1 hr but is shown in red)

Neither one or the other should be marked as over allocated. Could someone please explain how these fields are calculated and why they would be over allocated when the standard work week is 40 hrs.

Thanks

 

[PDQBach]

My answer to another question in this forum may be useful to you:

There are all sorts of possibilities

1. View | Resource Sheet and see what Max Units you have.
Note that the units are what Project will use by default but you can adjust a task's work/duration/units and that can force project to exceed the Max Units which, in turn, will show an over-allocation.

2. View | Resource Usage and then Tools | Options | View-tab and set the date format to something with the time. You may see several short duration tasks that start at (for easy example) 8:00am on the same day. This is particularly true if you have been entering the Start date (not not using predecessor links to let project control the task start).

3. Did you create a recurring task? They (generally) start at 8:00am unless you override it and can easily create a seeming overallocation even if you have followed step 2.

In other words, you created a task for 2 hours and set the start date to Monday. In project, that means Monday at 8:00am. Then you created a recurring task of 1 hour for a meeting every Monday. In project, that means every Monday at 8:00am. The resource has 2 hours of work on the task and 1 hour of work at the meeting. The total is 3 hours but because the two tasks occur at the same time the resource is over-allocated.