Re: Resource overutilization

Kurt,

To get real-world resource levelling you need to have concepts of
min/max resource percentages.

For instance, if a task has a resource listed at 20%, but for
a given time period, that resource is only available 10%.  Does this
mean you can increase the duration of the task and only use 10% of the
resource?

You also need to consider that you may not want resource levelling
to give 100 x 1% tasks to a resource.

Having a min/max resource percentage can solve both these problems.

cheers


Kurt Maute wrote:
> On Mon, 2003-04-21 at 17:15, Sasan Iman wrote:
> 
>>I don't think assigning to less than  100% would solve the problem. If I
>>have to manually identify the overlapped time, then I can schedule it
>>manually as well. The goal is to remove the necessity to manually
>>identify the overlapped time (region of over-utilization) and also
>>remove the need to rework the schedule because of changes in earlier
>>parts. Even if I did manually assign less than 100%, then when schedule
>>changes, I still need to go back and modify the percentages again. Not
>>very convenient.
> 
> 
> Maybe I don't fully understand you, but it seems to me that if you're
> identifying tasks that can be overlapped, you're essentially reducing
> the % allocations of resources on those tasks, but it sounds like you
> want to do it in a more flexible/automated way so you don't have to
> manage the allocations on individual tasks yourself.  Is that correct?
> 
> The most common approach to resource leveling involves the use of the
> 'minimum slack' rule.  Under this rule, tasks along the critical path
> are given priority in terms of resource allocations.  Tasks with
> successively more slack are examined to see which can be moved or
> extended to meet the objectives within the given constraints.  
> 
> Using this method, you don't need to assign a priority to each task
> manually, since that amount of slack does that for you.
> 
> The project manager can exercise control over the leveling by manually
> allocating people at less than 100%, or by bringing in/reassigning
> resources to different tasks.
> 
> Sasan, your proposed method might work just as well, its just not one of
> the more common ways of doing it.