Assigning Resources

The final step to putting together the project plan is to assign the resources according to the schedule developed in Chapter 5. Up to this point, you have identified the tasks in the project and developed a schedule that meets the expected end date of the project. Now you need to determine if you can accomplish this schedule with the resources and their available dates. This section looks at tools and methods available to help you make this determination.

Leveling Resources

Resource leveling is part of the broader topic of resource management. This is an area that has always created problems for project managers and the project schedule. Software packages that claim to do resource leveling just further aggravate the scheduling problem. Following are some of the situations that organizations have to deal with:

• Committing people to more than they can reasonably handle in the given time frame, reasoning that they will find a way to get it done but putting each of the projects they are assigned to further in harm's way
• Changing project priorities and not considering the impact on existing resource schedules
• The absence of a resource management function that can measure and monitor the capacity of the resource pool and the extent to which it is already committed to projects
• Employee turnover and promotions that are not reflected in the resource schedule

Any organization that does not have a way of effectively handling these situations will find itself in a situation analogous to the flow through a funnel, as depicted in Figure 6-4.

Figure 6-4: The resource scheduling problem

Figure 6-4 is a graphic portrayal of the resource-scheduling problem. The diameter of the funnel represents the total of all resources available for the project. Tasks can pass through the funnel at a rate that is limited by the amount of work that can be completed by the available resources according to the schedule of the tasks. You can try to force more into the funnel than it can accommodate, but doing so only results in turbulence in the funnel. You are no doubt familiar with situations where managers try to force more work onto your already fully loaded schedule. The result is either schedule slippage or less-than-acceptable output. In the funnel example, it results in rupture due to overload (such as requiring team members to work weekends and long hours).

The core teamwork takes place at the center of the pipeline. This center, where the tasks flow through the funnel, is the smoothest because it is based on a well-executed schedule. The work assigned to the contract team takes place along the edge of the funnel. According to the laws of flow in a pipeline, there is more turbulence at the walls of the structure. The deliverables are the completed task work. Because the diameter of the funnel is fixed, only so much completed work can flow from it.

Too many organizations believe that by simply adding more into the top of the funnel, more will come out of the bottom. Their rationale is that people will work harder and more efficiently if they know that more is expected. Although this may be true in a limited sense, it is not in the best interest of the project because it results in mistakes and compromised quality. Mistakes will be made as a direct result of the pressure from the overly ambitious schedule forced on people. In this chapter, I provide resource-leveling strategies that the project manager can adopt to avoid the situation depicted in the funnel example.

Take a step back for a moment. When you were creating the project network diagram, the critical path was the principal focal point for trying to finish the project by a specified date. The under- or over-allocation of resources was not a consideration. There's a reason for this. It is important to focus your attention on planning one portion of the project at a time. If you can't reach the desired finish date based strictly on the logical order in which tasks must be completed, why worry about whether resources are over- or under-allocated? You've got another problem to solve first. After the finish date has been accepted, you can address the problem of over-allocation, and, in some cases, under-allocation.

Resource leveling is a process that the project manager follows to schedule how each resource is allocated to tasks in order to accomplish the work within the scheduled start and finish dates of each task. Recall that the scheduled start and finish dates of every task are constrained by the project plan to lie entirely within their earliest start–latest finish (ES–LF) window. Were that not the case, the project would be delayed beyond its scheduled completion date. As resources are leveled, they must be constrained to the ES–LF window of the tasks to which they are assigned, or the project manager must seek other alternatives to resolve the conflict between resource availability and project schedule.

The resource schedule needs to be leveled for the following two reasons:

• To ensure that no resource is over-allocated. That is, you do not schedule a resource to more than 100 percent of its available time.
• You, as the project manager, want the number of resources (people, in most cases) to follow a logical pattern throughout the life of the project. You would not want the number of people working on the project to fluctuate wildly from day to day or from week to week. That would impose too many management and coordination problems. Resource leveling helps you avoid this by ensuring that the number of resources working on a project at any time is fairly constant. The ideal project would have the number of people resources relatively level over the planning phases, building gradually to a maximum during the project work phases, and decreasing through the closing phases. Such increases and decreases are manageable and expected in the life of a well-planned project.

Acceptably Leveled Schedule

As I begin this discussion of leveling resources, I want to be clear on one point. It is very unlikely, perhaps impossible, that you will develop a resource schedule that simultaneously possesses all the desirable characteristics I discuss. Of course, you will do the best you can and hope for a resource schedule that is acceptable to management and to those who manage the resources employed on your project. When a resource schedule is leveled, the leveling process is done within the availability of the resource to that project. When I discussed task estimating and resource assignments in Chapter 5, I said that resources are not available to work on a task 100 percent of any given day. Based on my clients' experiences, this number ranges from 50 to 75 percent. This value, for a typical average day, is the resource's maximum availability. In some project management software programs, this is referred to as max availability or max units. Some software applications allow this value to be varied by time period whereas others do not.

Ideally, you want to have a project in which all resource schedules can be accommodated within the resources' maximum availability. However, this may not always be possible, especially when project completion dates are paramount and may require some overtime. We're all familiar with this situation. Overtime should be your final fallback option, however. Use it with discretion and only for short periods of time. If at all possible, don't start your project off with overtime as the norm. You'll probably need it somewhere along the line, so keep it as part of your management reserve.