Re: Month by month resource leveling results in overallocated resource

Summary tasks aren't really tasks ... in fact they more resemble reports, serving to rollup their subtasks which represent the real deal. In fact, in a properly designed and detailed plan, if you deleted all the summary tasks while leaving all the lowest level subtasks intact, all of the work in the project would still get done.

Task priorities control the scheduling of a resource's work when the resource exceeds his maximum due to being assigned to several concurrent tasks. But since summaries are a:reports, not physical work activities; and b: should never have resources assigned to them, their priority settings are meaningless. Subtasks don't inherit their parent's priorities, instead the summaries are driven by the priorities of their children.

I'm confused as to your resource availability setting as you described it in your intial post - I'm wondering if this has something to do with your issue. You said your resource was "software" with 7.2 FTEs available about 70% of the time to give you a maximum availability of 500%. The resource assignment percentage is fundamentally a measure of the rate at which a resource generatess work output over time. A 70% assignment means that when the resource is working on something for a solid 8 hour day, for some reason they can only generate the amount of work that would normally only require about 6 hours to complete. While if you think in terms of days it seems to work out the same, it doesn't really mean they are available to work exclusive on the project tasks for 6 hours out of their 8 with the other 2 hours reserved for other activity. A task that requires 6 hours of work with the resource giving it his full attention is not an 8 hour duration task with a resource assigned 75%. Rather it is a 6 hour duration task that has the resource on it 100%. Also, I interpret an FTE as a warm body - when your plan gets to the point of assigning real resouces, each FTE will become a real live human being Joe or Mary or Bill or a piece of equipment, bulldozer serial XXXXX. So how do you get a "0.2" person? You'd also expect Joe to devote his full attention to the work he's been assigned to, ie. work at a 100% level. So I wonder if it would help your situation to go ahead and reflect that in your planning now by making your resource 700% reflecting that the group is made up of 7 individuals, each of whom is available for task assigments which require their full attention from start to finish?

Just sharing some ideas - hope this helps
--
Steve House [Project MVP]
MS Project Trainer & Consultant
Visit http://www.mvps.org/project/faqs.htm for the FAQs


"AprilPM" <AprilPM@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:7050D9C5-3CA1-42E0-AA90-1123A18FEFCC@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
A little more data. I played around with the priority. Everything works as
expected if I set the priority of this task to 500, ie, no resources appear
to be over-allocated after leveling. However, as soon as I make its priority
higher than 500 (600, 700, 800, or 900), the problem shows up again, ie, my
resource gets way over-allocated after leveling, and some of those
over-allocated months are not flagged with red. Of course, the start date
changes every time I change the priority, as it should. I knew 1000 priority
was a magic number (ie, the tasks are not affected by leveling), but I didn't
think there was anything special about the other priorities? It's almost
like MSP has the mind of an executive: "Wow! This is a really important
project! I better work my resources at 50% OT for the duration of this
project!" Also, does the priority of the summary task affect it at all? I
leave the summary task at the default (500) and only assign priorities to
the subtasks. I know under most circumstances that doesn't really make sense
but in this case my summary task is "Future Projects" and I have the future
projects listed underneath that, each with a gross effort/duration/resource
assignment, and their own priorites.

--
April


"AprilPM" wrote:

I am having trouble with resource leveling. I'm using MSP Professional
Desktop edition.
I have a resource, "software," who is available 500% (7.2 FTE's at about 70%
utilization).
I have a number of in-process tasks that I don't want to affect, so I set
them to priority 1000.
Future tasks have various priority, all less than 1000.
I have "month by month" leveling set.
The leveling order set to "Priority, Standard."
All other checkboxes in "resolving allocations" are unchecked.
I "clear leveling," then "level now."
I would expect to see no more than about 860 hours per month for this
resource after all the priority 1000 tasks are out of the way.
However, I see 1012 hours in January '08. In fact, December through May are
all over allocated with more than 900 hours (only December and February are
flagged as red, but I ignore the colorâ?¦too deceiving.)
Upon investigation, I see that MSP has started a 900 priority task which
requires a big portion of my "software" resource at this point in time.
Why would it not wait until resourses are available?
(My tasks are very long in duration in this timeframeâ?¦.many monthsâ?¦.I'm
doing a program-level "look-sie" at my organizations long-range resource
forecast, so each "task" in this timeframe is in fact a "project." The
Priority 1000 tasks are from currently committed and executing projects.)
Any ideas about what's happening?
--
April

.

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