Welcome back to our course on Project 2013.
In this previous section we started looking at leveling, covered some of the basics of
how to level all or part of a project, and we got to the leveling options regarding how
to resolve overallocations.
In this section we’re going to concentrate on the last batch of those options and we’re
going to start by looking at leveling order which is a very important option to understand.
Now in the Resource Leveling dialog in the Leveling Order control there are three options:
ID only, Standard, and Priority, comma, Standard which means priority followed by standard.
By default that is set at standard and standard is the setting that was used when I leveled
this project before.
Now in standard what Project 2013 does is to look at a number of factors including dependencies,
dates, and priorities in order to determine which tasks to delay in order to resolve resource
overallocations.
If you look at what actually happened here, let me just move that dialog out of the way,
we had four tasks to begin with: ground floor doors, upper floor doors, ground floor windows,
and upper floor windows.
They were all starting on the same date.
It delayed three of them and the one that it delayed the most was upper floor doors.
It delayed ground floor windows by seven elapsed days and upper floor windows by 12 elapsed
days.
Elapsed days will include weekends.
Now why it did that, it’s a function of the calculation that it does.
But let’s look at the impact of these other options on how they would have approached
the leveling here.
Let’s first of all look at ID only.
In the case of ID only, the way that resource leveling works is to base it purely on the
IDs of the tasks.
The higher the ID the more likely a task is to be delayed.
So the task near the beginning of the project will tend to be the ones that keep their timescales
and the ones later on will be the ones that tend to be delayed.
Now you may remember me mentioning right near the beginning of the course that in effect
the sequence of the tasks in terms of how they appear in the project schedule isn’t
really important, but this is one of those aspects where it is in that by implication
here the tasks that have higher ID numbers, the ones that are lower down if you like in
your chart, are the ones that are generally going to be later and therefore the ones that
generally you’re going to be more likely to be prepared to delay when you have resource
overallocation issues.
So that is one situation in which there is some significance in the position of a task
within the list of project tasks.
And it also is another reason to, generally speaking, have the earlier tasks near the
beginning of the project.
So what I’m going to do now is to make sure that I’ve got that ID only selected and
I’m going to clear the existing leveling for the entire project.
And now when I level the entire project, I should see the ID only option take effect.
So click on Level All and what happens this time is that the leveling delay that’s added
to the tasks which were overallocated is strictly in order of ID.
So the task with ID 10 is not delayed at all, 11 is delayed by seven elapsed days, 13 by
nine elapsed days, 14 by 14 elapsed days.
And now my overallocations have gone and I’ve used the option of ID based leveling.
Now let’s look at incorporating priority into leveling.
So what I’m going to do here is to clear the existing leveling for the entire project,
then I’m going to choose one of the tasks.
What about ground floor windows?
Double click to open up the task information and I’m going to give that task a priority
of 520, so a slightly higher priority than all of the other tasks within my project.
Click on OK.
Now go into Leveling Options and in the leveling order I’m going to select the third option
which is Priority, comma, Standard, click on OK, and now let me do a level all.
And what you’ll now find is that the task with the higher priority which is ground floor
windows, Task 13, is now the one that doesn’t get delayed.
The other three tasks all have the same priority as each other so the order in which they are
leveled is the standard order which, in this case, means that ground floor doors happens
first, then upper floor windows, and then upper floor doors.
So that’s the three options for leveling order.
Now let’s look at the other options within the resolving overallocation section of the
Resource Leveling dialog.
First of all, we have level only within available slack.
Now we haven’t talked about slack yet.
We’re going to talk about that in a subsequent section when we talk about the critical path.
But basically if you have this checked, Level only within available slack, Project 2013
is constrained to leveling in such a way that you don’t delay the overall project.
Some of the tasks which are overallocated or which share overallocated resource it may
be possible to delay without delaying the overall project.
And basically if you have this option checked, they’re the only ones that Project 2013
is going to add a leveling delay to.
So it will only level tasks where you don’t affect the end date.
Now at the moment I don’t have that checked so that means that leveling in the case of
the project I’m working on here could involve delaying the overall project.
We’ll talk about slack later on and then I think this option will mean a lot more to
you.
Now to fully understand the next option you’re going to need to know a little bit more about
how work is distributed in a task.
I’m going to come back to that later on.
But basically what this option here, Leveling can adjust individual assignments on a task,
what that means is that leveling is allowed to adjust one resources work schedule on a
task independently of other resources that are working on the same task.
Now in some situations that may be reasonable and in others it may not.
And the next one also may be reasonable in some circumstances and not in others.
Leveling can create splits in remaining work.
Let’s suppose that you’re partway through a task, you’ve done say half of a task and
you have a resource overallocation issue.
Generally speaking, because the task is started, then Project 2013 won’t be able to reschedule
the start date of the task because it’s already started.
But if you allow Project 2013 to split a task what it can do is to spread it into two.
The work that’s completed is completed, so it’s in the past.
And the work that remains to be done effectively forms a new task that can be leveled, so it
can have a leveling delay added to it and that work can be moved off into the future.
Now given the type of work that you do, the type of projects you manage and the type of
task, it may or may not be reasonable for you to allow that when you’re working on
your projects.
Now the last two options here I’m going to deal with quite quickly.
One of them, Level resources with the proposed booking type, there are booking types and
one of them is propose.
This is where you’ve got a request to use a resource but you haven’t actually got
a committed resource assignment yet.
We’re not going to be talking about propose booking types on this course but if you do
use propose booking types, then you can see here whether those proposed bookings should
be included in the resource leveling calculations.
Bear in mind that with a proposed booking you may not have confirmed it, you may not
know whether you’re actually going to have that task or indeed the relevant resource
working on that task.
The last option, Level manually scheduled tasks.
We’ve talked about manually scheduled task.
If you want to include manually scheduled tasks within resource leveling, then make
sure this checkbox is checked and the resources used on manually scheduled tasks will be rolled
into the leveling process with the ones that are in the auto scheduled tasks as well.
So that’s pretty much it on the Resource Leveling dialog and there’s just one other
thing I want to show you in relation to leveling.
Let me just clear this leveling again one more time, clear it for the whole project,
go back and select the first task again.
One of the things that you can do is to step through the leveling requirements for a project
using the Next overallocation button in the Level Group on the Resource tab.
So if I click on Next overallocation, it takes me to the next overallocation.
Of course, in this project, which is quite a small, simple project, we only have four
and they’re all for the same resource.
But if you just want to step from overallocation to overallocation, look at each particular
situation, and maybe resolve it manually or at least consider whether it’s appropriate
to resolve it in an automatic way the next overallocation can help you with that.
And then also if you want to take a look at overallocations and what the shape of them
is, don’t forget if we go back to View we can go to the Resource Usage View or Resource
Graph.
Let’s go to Resource Usage.
In tabular form, you can identify whether resource overallocations are.
If you look at the list of resources here, you can see that carpenter has a nice yellow
warning sign there.
This resource is overallocated.
A list of the tasks that that resource is working on and then if I step through I can
find red wherever there is a resource overallocation.
So in this case, in that particular week we have 88 hours work scheduled for the carpenter
against the background working week of 40 hours.
And of course, let’s just have one quick look then at the Resource Graph, apply the
resource graph, let’s find carpenter.
We can see overallocated in red there and again if we step through it’s easy to see
where the overallocation occurs.
So that’s it on resource leveling for now and that’s it in this section.
I’ll see you in the next one.