The Schedule – Resource Leveling

“Happy people plan actions, they don’t plan results.”

                                                                                                                - Dennis Wholey

We are nearing the end of the series on scheduling basics.  We have taken the WBS, added the dependency chain, estimated the effort and assigned resources.  The next step to completing the well-formed schedule is to level the resource assignments.  This is done to:

• Prevent over allocation of a resource within the project
• Prevent over allocation of a resource across enterprise assignments
• Accommodate non-productive time and absences

First, let’s assume the project is in an organization following best practices.  In that case, all team members record all of their time each cycle to specific project tasks and to operations, administrative, absence, and other non-project activities.  Your project management software integrates with these time records (or time is entered directly into the software, such as Sharepoint wih MS Project EPM, Clarity or Primavera).  In this case, you already have all of the elements in place to just “push the button” on your project management software to resource level the schedule.  You will then want to review and fine tune the results.

On the other hand, if you do not have the luxury of these conditions, you have more work.  For example, you will have to tune and adjust using heuristics to get the right productivity factor so that you don’t over allocate resources within the project;  and it will be much harder to track other assignments and activities to prevent over-allocation across enterprise activities.

In either case, this step will be repeated regularly over the life of the project.  Rescheduling and replanning are regular activities in the Project Manager’s Cycle.

In my next post, we’ll conclude this series of posts on the basics of creating the well-formed schedule by discussing risk buffers.

If you are not in a “best practice” environment, what steps do you follow to produce a resource-leveled schedule?

The Project Manager’s Cycle – Reschedule/Replan

“What do you mean ‘You’re going to be gone for four weeks starting next month?,’” asked Alice, after picking up the phone on one of the rare occasions she was actually at her desk and listening to Ravi explain his new vacation plans.  “But … well, you didn’t know.  I just found out that Infrastructure is slipping their schedule so we’re going to need you until the end of the month after all.”

Now we transition from initiation activities to planning and design within The Project Manager’s Cycle. 

If it hasn’t been done already, all the team member updates from the metric validation and the task validation need to be posted to the project schedule, including closing completed tasks, updating effort estimates, and opening tasks ready to start.  Your perfect plan from last week is now corrupted from just one week of actual results – new end dates, team members who are now over allocated,  team members who won’t be available as previously planned due to conflicts or newly planned absences, newly exposed issues, political maneuvering, prioritization conflicts, team member conflicts, and stakeholder conflicts.

Now you, the project manager, apply intelligence to scheduling, adjusting start dates, shuffling tasks, balancing resource allocations, and drawing on schedule buffers as needed.  Sure, your scheduling tool “auto schedules” and probably has an option to load-balance resources.  However, the rule engines for these are notorious for making obscene messes of your schedule.  Depending on the need to maintain the original target dates and prevent slippage, you may need to consider adding resources, overloading resources (OT), reducing scope, and crashing the schedule.

As a further part of this activity, you will also address event-driven activities, such as unplanned/dynamic impacts, deliverable acceptances, reprioritization, issues, problems, commitments, and the other conflicts mentioned above.  This may involve adding project tasks, reassessing resource assignments and allocations, changing task estimates and getting team members to re-estimate their task assignments.

The end result is a new draft schedule that you have to validate and “socialize,” which transitions us to the next activity in The Project Manager’s Cycle and sets the stage for my next post.

Unlike most of the other activities in The Project Manager’s Cycle, rescheduling and replanning is not something that is done and then completes.  Rather, every thing you as the PM does has the potential to expose a need to adjust the schedule;  adjusting the schedule has the potential to expose the need to further adjust the schedule or to take some action that will … well, it’s called The Project Manager’s Cycle for a reason.  This keeps happening ever and forever for the life of the project.    You are constantly restarting this activity.  Plan on it.

How do you live with yourself when you have the perfect project plan?