Resource Leveling

To: Senior Management

From: Conveyor Belt Project Management Team

Date: 12/22/2010

Subject: Resource Leveling

We know that a project plan is not a schedule until resources are committed. This document aims to handle resource allocation (and over-allocation) issues. The document starts by analyzing whether there are any resource over-allocation problems. Then it tries to solve the resource over-allocation problems in both time constrained and resource constrained situations by resource leveling (by leveling within and outside slack). It also discusses the impact of leveling on the sensitivity of the overall project. Finally, it suggests possible courses of action.

If we look at the resource usage sheet, we find that three of our resources are over-allocated namely; Design, Development and Documentation.

Firstly, we try to resolve the over-allocation problems by resource leveling given that the project is time constrained. In this case, we have to do resource leveling within the available slack. By doing that, we noticed that the over allocation problems are resolved with regards to Design and Documentation. However Development still remains over allocated and hence would require assigning more team(s). The Gantt chart, schedule table and resource usage after leveling can be seen in Exhibit 1-A, 1-B and 1-C.

Let's have a look at the effects of leveling on the network. Leveling within slack affected the network to a large extent. Design and Documentation (which were over allocated previously) are now allocated. However Development still remains a problem. Leveling has caused complexity to be increased to a greater degree because the resource constraints are added to the technical constraints. In a stark contrast to the un-leveled network, the critical path has been affected as now we have multiple critical paths rather than a single one. Slack has an inverse relationship with the sensitivity of the project. Since the slack has now been utilized to level the network, any unforeseen events will now have an adverse affect on our project because we have now little or no room to compensate the uncertainties.

Now, we'll try to consider a resource constrained situation and try to solve over-allocation problems by leveling outside of slack. This results in a completely leveled network. The complexities are also resolved as we shall now have a single critical path and hence a comparatively simpler network. However such a leveling increases the duration of the project drastically by 140 days. This means that the project will now span over duration of 670 days instead of 530 days. The Gantt chart, schedule table and resource usage after leveling outside of slack is provided in Exhibit 2-A, 2-B and 2-C respectively:

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