Hello again and welcome back to our course on Project 2013.
In last section we looked at some of the basic ideas behind scheduling.
In this section we’re going to look at leveling which is a process whereby we level the resources
on a project or at least try to.
We try to get to a situation where none of the resources are overallocated.
Now what I’m going to do in this section is to demonstrate leveling first and then
to discuss exactly what’s happened and how we control it.
So let’s get started.
We’re still looking at the same schedule and in this case we’ve got four resource
overallocations for the carpenter.
In order to demonstrate leveling, what I’m going to do though is to change the view and
we’re going to bring up a particular variant on the Gantt Chart.
So click on Gantt Chart, come to More Views, and one of the views there is Leveling Gantt.
So apply the Leveling Gantt View.
Now when you look at the Leveling Gantt one of the columns you can see in the table is
this column, leveling delay, and the basic thing that happens when you level a project
or part of a project is that leveling delay is adding to some of the tasks.
Now when you see a time period like the time period, you can see here edays; you can also
get things like eweeks, it’s elapsed.
So an eday is a 24-hour elapsed period.
It doesn’t relate to the number of working hours in a day, for example.
It’s just an elapsed period.
So if something has a leveling delay of three edays, it means that task has been delayed
by three elapsed days.
It’s moved later in our schedule.
When you first look at a new project or one that hasn’t been leveled before anyway,
then all of the leveling delays will normally be set to zero edays and when you perform
leveling, then some of the tasks will get a leveling delay added to them.
So what I’m going to do now is to level this project and you’ll see what effect
that has.
Notice at the moment that we’ve still got these four carpenter tasks over here.
We’ve still got the four red markers to indicate overallocation.
So let’ do some leveling.
Let’s go to the Resource tab an in the Level Group on the Resource tab right in the middle
there’s a button that says Level All, and this will level the entire project.
Now generally speaking you wouldn’t necessarily level an entire project.
You’d probably level part of it, maybe just over some time period or for one or two resources,
but let’s do a Level All to see what happens.
Now when we’ve done a level all here, what actually happens is that we find that some
of the tasks have leveling delays defined.
Upper floor doors has got a 15 eday, elapsed day leveling delay.
Now what that means if you look at the relevant part of the Gantt Chart on the right is that
the little green block is where the task originally was and the blue block is where it is now,
and that represents a 15 elapsed day delay.
Similarly, if you look at ground floor windows that’s got a seven elapsed day delay and
upper floor windows has got a 12 elapsed eday delay.
Notice that all of the overallocation markers have gone.
So Project 2013 has successfully removed all of the overallocations on this project.
Now I haven’t talked so far about end dates and so on but I’m sure you can realize from
this that it will have effectively pushed back the end date of our project because we’ve
delayed some of the tasks within the project.
That won’t always happen though, but very often it will.
Now notice that we were only getting overallocations for the carpenter, but because we said level
all, all of the project has been leveled.
So, even some of the tasks like Lay foundation which aren’t jobs that the carpenter was
working on and didn’t have an overallocation problem have been leveled.
Of course, the leveling delay is zero edays but you can still see the green and blue blocks
there just emphasizing the fact that there was no delay added to this task.
To undo the affects of leveling you could just use the Undo button.
But within the Level Group there is also a Clear Leveling button which basically clears
all the leveling that’s been done on a selected part of the project.
So let’s just say clear leveling.
Entire project or selected tasks?
We’ll go for entire project and basically that’ll put things back to the way that
they were.
Now let’s look at another approach.
Let’s click this time on Level Resource and what that does is to give us a list of
resources for the project and we can choose a specific resource like in this case Carpenter
and click on Level Now and what happens is that just the task for which the carpenter
is a resource is subject to leveling.
As before, the leveling has removed all of the overallocations.
So what I want to look at next are the leveling options which are also accessible from the
Level Group on the Resource tab.
So click on Leveling Options and you get the Resource Leveling dialog and we’re going
to go through this starting at the top.
Some of these options take a little bit of explanation.
Right at the top the first one, Leveling calculations, you have a choice of automatic or manual and
I have this currently set at manual and, in fact, I pretty much always have this set at
manual.
If you have it set at automatic, then while you’re working on your project, Project
2013 will be leveling the resources for you.
I find that this can be incredibly annoying really because until you’ve got the project
in you may not have made final decisions about who to allocate resources to and sometimes
until you can see the whole picture, it’s difficult to make specific decisions about
individual tasks in terms of resource assignments.
So for example, if I’ve got a general resource called Carpenter but maybe I’ve got three
named carpenters, I may want to put carpenter on each of the tasks for which a carpenter
is needed and then decide who does which job later.
Having allocated the resource carpenter to each of those tasks, it will probably get
pretty much overallocated straightaway.
But, of course, that’s only a temporary measure until I assign the named carpenters.
Now you may choose to work with leveling calculation set to automatic, that’s entirely up to
you, but I generally have it set at manual all of the time.
Now the next option says Look for overallocations on a, and then you have a drop down where
you can choose between minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, week by week, month by
month basis.
When you allocate resources to the various tasks in your project, you will sometimes
find that somebody appears to be overallocated and they aren’t really.
Let me give you an example.
Let’s suppose that you have a particular resource who’s allocated for 50% of their
time in a particular week to do a particular task, so half of their time is being used
throughout the week to do a task.
So they’re certainly not overallocated if they don’t have any other tasks.
But let’s suppose that that resource has to take a day off say to go to the doctors.
So the person is working four days and at the doctors on one day.
Now during that four days, that person can quite easily do the five half days of work,
the two and a half days of work that you’ve got allocated.
But the problem is that according to the schedule on one day, they can’t do that half day.
Now you and I know that they can spread the half they can’t do because they’re at
the doctors over the rest of the week but Project 2013 doesn’t necessarily know that.
It can’t make those sorts of assumptions itself.
Now if we look for overallocations on a day by day basis, Project 2013 in that situation
would find a problem because it would say that person who’s scheduled to work on that
task for half of their time can’t do any of it on that particular day because they’re
at the doctors.
Their calendar says that they’re not available.
But we know that they can spread the work out over the week.
Now in that situation if we looked for allocations on a week by week basis, there wouldn’t
be a problem because Project would add up what they’ve got allocated for the week,
so they’ve got two and a half days of actual work, that’s 50% of a five day week and
a day at the doctor.
So two and a half plus one, that’s three and a half days in a five day working week;
there isn’t an overallocation.
Now how you do this and which of these options you choose will very much depend on you, your
project, and your approach to resource leveling.
I tend on this sort of project that takes a period of weeks or months, I would tend
to have overallocations looked for on a week by week basis.
But we’re going to run with day by day at the moment and then we’ll look at one or
two of the problems that occur as we come across them later on.
Now let’s look at the next option which is a checkbox, Clear leveling values before
leveling.
You’ve already seen that the way that leveling works is to add a leveling delay and what
you can do by having that checkbox checked is that each time that Project 2013 tries
to level your project or a selected part of your project, it begins by clearing the leveling
that it’s done before and effectively starting from scratch.
Now the significance of that will become more apparent later on but I generally work on
the principle that I clear leveling values before leveling, so I ask it to make a fresh
start.
It still has all the rules in place, the resource availability may have changed, tasks may have
changed, introduced, deleted, completed and so on, so I generally tend to find that starting
from scratch with that on any particular occasion gives better results.
But again it’s partly a matter of personal preference.
Now roughly in the middle of the Resource Leveling dialog there we have a couple of
options where we can decide whether to level the entire project or whether to level a selected
date range.
We’ve seen that before.
But below that we have options related to how to resolve overallocations and the rules
to follow when resolving overallocations.
Now these rules related to resolving overallocations you need to understand pretty well so we’re
going to concentrate on those in the next section.
That’s it for this one.
I’ll see you then.