RESOURCE SHEET

Hi Faisal,

It looks like you’re using trades (bricklayer / carpenter) instead of named individuals (John Smith / Fred Smith). MS Project doesn’t know this and assumes that each entry in your resource sheet is a single individual.

You know that you’ve got more than one carpenter working on the roof, but MS Project doesn’t. It thinks that the resource you have scheduled to do the roofing has more work assigned than they can physically complete in the allotted timescale. That’s probably why it’s showing as an overallocation.

Try looking at the Resource Graph (View > Resource Graph) and then deciding for yourself whether or not they’re actually overallocated.

As an example if their peak units are 400% but there are five carpenters on the job, then they’re not overallocated. If their peak units are 400% and there are only two carpenters then they are.

Regards,

Darren

thanks darren

but there are some other complications arising as well let me connfirm it then ill get back to you for more reccomendations and advice

if the single trade (eg carpenter) was given 400%, what does it mean? does it mean 4 units of carpenter? If my project has a lot of different trades, eg welder, grinder, fitter and so on. Plus, we are looking at the number of >50 units for each trades. What should I do? Thanks and appreciate help.

Darren has given a very good answer. He did miss one vital point off.

If your carpenter has been assigned in the resource sheet as 400%. This means you have 4 of them (I hope this answers Thomas’s question).

You have overloaded resources (red) when the plan dictates you need more, eg 5 tasks happening concurrently all requiring 1 carpenter.

Your options are to find an extra resource or move one of these tasks. Now all good planning tools will have a resource leveling option to do this for you. Tools and Level Resources.. in MSP. Using this option it will move the overloads depending on constraints - if you have no float then it may do nothing.

To be honest this can get quite complex - I suggest you save a copy of your plan in case you don’t like the results.

I am not sure if I’ve ever used this option in MSP but I have used it in P5.

thanks mark. one question, why does MSP go by percentage for resource and not by unit? what does that mean? can we have 120% for a trade?

And how you will define that there is a need for 4 resource units with 50% workload on some activity?

In the Resource Sheet, see the Max Units field.
This, and the assignment stacking, determines when the Resource becomes over-allocated.
Maybe you have one carpenter assigned to a Task at 100% and another at only 20%, so that’s 120% on the Task.
So you have > 50 people per trade, maybe 8 trades, so maybe 450 people. Make a list of their names and assign them to Tasks. Mostly, they will be assigned at 100%. If you don’t know their names, then call them:
Carpenter 1
Carpenter 2
.
.
Carpenter 2
etc.

It makes for a long list but is much better than Carpenters at Max Units = 5000%, which is much harder for you to control and leaves all of the deployment to be managed ad-hoc at site level.

And the work will be postponed because Carpenter 1 assigned to it is at the scheduled moment busy on the other work but Carpenter 2 is free but not assigned.
It is not a good solution unless the package supports skill scheduling. MS Project does not support it, so the solution is not practical.

In responce to Thomas’s point MSP can use units. To change from percentage go to

Tools>Options>Schedule

Show assignment units as a or

Select Decimal from the drop down list. Then you can assign as 1 for full time or 0.5 for half the time etc

But how to assign 4 units for half time?

dear all thanks for clarifing my que4ies but one question still remains unanswered if i have finished allocaying rresources nad then it shows(MSP 2007) that some of the resources are overallocated how do i now go about allocating the resources properly.