How to Level Resources in Microsoft Project 2016
During this Microsoft Project 2016 training tutorial video, we will discuss the basics of resource leveling and demonstrate the manual resolution of over-allocation.
Video Transcript
Hello and welcome back to our course on Project 2016.
We’re starting this section from Wedding 05 and we’re going to look at Resource Leveling.
The way we left things in the preceding section is that I had assigned the bride and groom to the tasks for which they have a level of involvement during the planning of the wedding. And we can see that both of them are significantly over-allocated, particularly during one period in the second half of December where they have a lot of different things to be doing all at once.
You can see the specific tasks that are over-allocated with the indicator in the left hand column there in the display. And as I pointed out to you in the preceding section if we look at the Resource Sheet the two resources there that are marked in red are the ones that are over-allocated.
And of course in something like this project we don’t really have the option of say having a couple of extra brides or a couple of extra grooms to spread the work over. In another project, such as for example the bathroom refit, if the tiler or the plasterer or the bathroom fitter had too much work to do you could possibly get a second person into help but that isn’t really an option for us here.
Now one of the things that I mentioned in the preceding section, which is of course a very important thing to do, is to make sure that you have your default task type set correctly. Let’s just take a look at that now.
On the Schedule page in Project Options in Scheduling Options for this project note that I have this project selected. So that’s Wedding 05. And the default task type I now have is fixed duration.
Note also that I have the checkbox, New tasks are effort driven, is not checked. Now if I go back to this dropdown here, for all new projects my overall default is still a default task type of fixed units. So in the absence of a specific change for a specific project, that is if you like my default default it’s fixed units. You will obviously need to set that up in the way that suits you.
It’s very likely when you are planning projects and as your projects progress that you will experience overallocation of resources and there are a number of ways of resolving these over-allocations and we’re going to be looking at quite a few during the course. But before we do just one very important point to make is this. There isn’t some universal, if you like, panacea for over-allocations.
There isn’t one way of resolving over-allocations, which is always the right way of doing it. The resolution of over-allocations almost always involves understanding the underlying project, the underlying business, the underlying activity that your project relates to because you have quite a few, if you like, nobs and dials that you can adjust in order to get the best result when you’re resolving over-allocations.
Now one of the key things you normally you need to decide is whether to resolve over-allocations manually or automatically. Both of them have a place and it may well be that you work on the principle that as far as possible you resolve over-allocations automatically but that you’ll revert to manual methods where necessary.
It actually wouldn’t be that complicated for us to go through and resolve all of the over-allocations in this particular plan manually. But it can be very time consuming. And automating this process as much as possible is usually the best approach if you can in fact automate it successfully, which is not always the case.
Now the first thing I’m going to do is to demonstrate a manual resolution of an overallocation. And I’m just going to take the first overallocation, Select wedding dress, and show you very quickly how you could resolve that manually.
Now the fact that Project 2016 has put that red marker there that says this task has over-allocated resources tells you that it knows there’s a problem. It also says right click for options so let’s right click. And we’re really interested in the top three options. The first of those is Fix in Task Inspector. We’re going to look at the Task Inspector later in the course so we’ll come back to that one.
And the third one is Ignore problems for this task. In the same way that in the preceding section once or twice I said let’s ignore that warning from the Planning Wizard, there will be situations where you have an apparent overallocation but either you know it’s not really a problem for reasons I’ll look at later on or you may know that you’re going to fix that problem later and you don’t need to deal with it now. So you do have the option of ignoring a particular problem related to overallocation.
The second option is the one that you’ll very often use when you’re doing manual resolution. And it is Reschedule to available date. And what you’re basically saying to Project 2016 is I want you to find a date when this task can happen and I don’t then have an overallocation against it. And that’s what we’re going to do here, Reschedule to available date. Now notice the task has been rescheduled.
And also notice that the red mark is gone from the left column there against task with ID 10. And also note that the date, the end date of our project has pushed right out quite a long way actually. So we’ve pushed everything related to the wedding dress out to the right because of course that one task, Select wedding dress, had a number of successors, including Order dress, Measurements, and Fittings.
And of course that delays the Attire summary task which in turn delays the whole of the preparation phase. And if we look down here we’ll see now that our wedding date has moved out to June the 10th.
Now we could go through each of these over-allocated tasks and resolve it manually in that way. But as I say that would be time consuming and generally speaking we’d like to automate it. So let’s look now at how we might automate this process.
Now you might be tempted in this situation to undo what we just did and start again with an automated version of this process. But before we do I want to demonstrate something else. I’m going to change the view. And the view we’re going to use is one specifically that we use when we’re working on leveling resources. So I’m going to click on View and I’m going to go for Other Views, More Views. And I’m going to choose Leveling Gantt.
Now the Leveling Gantt View effectively shows you what Project 2016 is doing in terms of leveling the resources on a project. Now when you apply a new view like this it’s very often the case that the timescale is all completely wrong. So let’s go for Entire Project so that we see the project on the right there.
And you note in particular this little colored bar here against Select wedding dress. That bar represents the leveling delay, the amount of delay that was added to that when we did the manual leveling just now. And we have in fact a set of tools to handle leveling delays.
Now before I use one of those tools look at the table on the left. Let me just make the name column a little bit wider. There is a column there, Leveling Delay. And the current leveling delay on that task is 42 e-days. E-days are Elapsed days. So when we did the manual resource leveling just now what Project 2016 had to do was to delay that task by 42 elapsed days. And that’s the currently applied leveling delay to that task.
Now notice that its successor tasks which were also delayed were not delayed because of leveling of themselves. They were delayed because we delayed the Select wedding dress task that had the resource overallocation. So their leveling e-days are set at zero days. They weren’t delayed because of a leveling problem. They were delayed because they are successors of a task that had a leveling problem.
Now if I wanted to put this particular project back the way that it was I could obviously do the Undo, but I also can go to the Resource Tab and click on a button there, Clear Leveling in the Level Group. Watch what happens if I clear the leveling. I get an option of clearing it for the whole project or if I’m just working on part of the project or I want to clear the leveling on part of the project I can select the relevant tasks and change this option to selected tasks.
As I’ve only done one bit of leveling here I’ll stick with entire project. Click on OK and basically what happens is that task goes back to where it was before. And if I now reverted back to the Gantt Chart View it would look exactly how it looked before. And of course I’ve got my overallocation indicator on the left there for task ID 10.
Now before we look at automatically leveling let me just point something else out. We asked Project 2016 to reschedule Select wedding dress to a date where the resource wouldn’t be over-allocated. You can reschedule these things completely manually yourself. So there will be nothing to stop me going into any of these tasks and changing the start and finish dates.
And I could go through all of them and change the start and finish dates manually, schedule them manually, change their task types from auto-scheduled to manually scheduled if necessary, and fix any of these dates in time if I wanted to. But what we want to look at now is the opposite of doing that and that is putting everything in Project 2016’s hands and seeing if it can resolve these over-allocations automatically.
So I’m back in regular Gantt Chart View and I go to the Resource Tab. And in that Level Group that we saw just now there are two buttons there. There’s Level Resource and Level All. Level Resource gives me the ability to level one or more selected resources. So if all I wanted to do was to level the bride and make sure that she’s not over-allocated I can select one resource and click on Level Now and Project 2016 will try to level the bride over the project so that she’s not over-allocated at any stage.
Now it’s important to recognize it will try because it may well be that the constraints, the deadlines, the dependencies, they may mean that she cannot be leveled. There are going to be situations where she’s just got too much to do over a period of time. So you may find in many of your projects that you can’t completely resolve over-allocations or should I say not in a way that you’re happy with. You may have to make some compromises or other changes in order to achieve a completely leveled project.
So that’s leveling an individual resource. The Level All button basically levels all resources. And if I click on Level All let’s see what happens. I will normally get one or more warnings. And this is a warning. Note the yellow triangle on the left there. Project cannot resolve the overallocation of bride on Thursday, July 14th. When you get these there are often three choices. The first choice is To continue working on other over-allocated resources click Skip, To continue leveling and skip over-allocations that cannot be resolved click Skip All.
So if there’s a problem found here and I’m going to say well let’s just keep going and whatever problems you find just keep skipping them and leave the problems and I’ll sort them out later. And the third option is to Stop leveling click on Stop. Now what I’m going to do here is to say Skip All and then having click on Skip All we’ll see how many of the resource over-allocations Project 2016 can resolve.
And there we are. Now as you can see most of the red markers in the first column have gone. And our wedding is now on August the 1st. So the dates pushed out a long way. Don’t forget that little deadline marker there. You see we’re still a month short of our deadline marker so that’s not too bad.
But we do still have some over-allocations and if I click on the Resource Sheet you’ll see that both the bride and the groom still have overallocation issues.
Now clearly we’re going to need to look at those outstanding over-allocations to find out what’s causing them and whether we can resolve them or what we have to change to resolve them.
But when we look at the schedule itself we may well find issues with that. Overall there are some very good aspects of the schedule now because, for example, we have the reception venue identified, we have the wedding venue identified, and they’re both done before we send out the invitations which is pretty good.
We also have the wedding itself registered and licensed early on. But when we look at things like caterer, baker, florist, and so on we’re making the shortlist and then there’s a long time before we book those people. And the booking is probably a little bit too late in the day ideally. We seem to have left the bookings much too late in the process.
Whereas with other aspects such as the wedding rings maybe they’re roughly in the right kind of place. But quite often when you look at schedule after leveling you’ll find that the resulting schedule doesn’t really tie in with the ideal sequence of events. And there are a number of options that you can apply when leveling to help you to get just the kind of sequence of events that you want while still resolving any over-allocations. And the use of those options is what we’re going to look at in the next section. So please join me for that.
Simon Calder
Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA. He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!
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