MS Project Resource Leveling

¶ … MS Project

What was the original project duration prior to resource leveling? (Week 5 (1) file is the WBS before leveling)

In MS Project, a report was run to find the project's total duration. The total duration of the project before the resources were leveled was 140.73 and this made the expected project completion date April 9th, 2012.

What was the revised project duration after resource leveling? (Week 5 (2) is the WBS after leveling)

After the resources were leveled another report was run. This time the duration was calculated to be 84.75 days with a 55.96 day variance.

Carefully read the resource leveling section in Chapter 8. Based on your reading and experience in MS software, why is resource leveling important in schedule development?

Resource leveling is a way to fix resource over allocation. Generally, resources are leveled in two ways (MS Office, 2011):

By delaying a task until the assigned resource has time to work on it.

By splitting a task so that part of a task is done when planned and the rest of it is done later when the assigned resource has time.

Basically, even though task durations may dictate that the project has a certain overall duration, resources may be "double booked" since the resources may be working on multiple activities. For example, say an employee is assigned to two task that overlap in there scheduling. Obviously the same person can't effectively work on two different tasks at the same time and therefore not only must there be an activity hierarchy but resources must also be considered.