As more and more hours snowball, the guarantee of higher stress levels grows up quick. In order to complete projects without forcing anyone to work over time, project managers turn to different resource optimization techniques, resource leveling being one of them.
But what does it really mean to level resources? When is resource leveling applied in the resource management process? What are the reasons to use it whatsoever? What are the tactics? Resource leveling, by definition, is a resource optimization technique that answers when the project can be finished with the available resources without overbooking them or spreading them too thin.
Resource leveling will generally aim to distribute work between resources fairly, which not only contributes to a healthy work environment, but also makes the project schedule realistic and achievable. Putting your current bandwidth front and center, resource leveling can either compress the schedule or loosen it. What resource leveling is mainly for is to get the idea when the project can be accomplished without necessarily adding capacity to the resource pool. An obvious example of resource leveling would be moving start and end dates of tasks to balance the workloads and avoid over- or under-allocation of resources.
While over-allocated resources have more work than they can complete within their normal 8-hour schedule, under-allocated resources have spare time to dedicate to the project and tasks.
Resource leveling will straighten out over-allocation by relocating task start and end dates, as in the example below:. However, in the original project plan, you notice that he is assigned two different tasks he can't physically complete in two days. Resource leveling will reschedule these two tasks, so they are carried out on different days.
It will untangle the conflict immediately. First, the idea behind resource leveling is to avoid huge swings in the utilization of labor. Second, resource leveling results in fewer problems for project personnel and accounting departments. Balanced workloads often lead to higher throughput and reduced project costs. The objective of resource smoothing, therefore, is uniform resource utilization, as it aims to complete the work by the specified date while avoiding ebbs and flows of resource demand.
Most of the time, resource smoothing is used after resource leveling. Resource allocation answers the question of who and when can be allocated to the project during the planning phase. Therefore, it defines project resource requirements and commits people with certain roles to the project. This is done considering a myriad of factors, such as resource availability, skills, rate cards, etc.
By contrast, resource leveling is in most instances applied when the project is underway to resolve resource conflicts and is known as a crisis management method. More on the use cases in the next section below. Sorry…something went wrong. Please try again later. How resource leveling can help you manage your resources like a pro. Georgina Guthrie in Project Management. What is resource leveling? What happens when you level your resources?
How to perform resource leveling First, work out the project completion date. When estimating this, aim for somewhere in-between best and worst-case scenarios. You can use a PERT chart to help you calculate this. Next, define the most important activities and schedule these first. You can use the float value of each activity to determine its importance. Then, create your task schedule using the critical path method. Finally, prioritize your tasks. Float is the most common index. But you may have other factors you want to take into account, like budget and other personal preferences.
During the starting phase of a project, idealistically the roles are assigned to resources human resources at which point the resources are not identified. Resource leveling helps an organization to make use of the available resources to the maximum. The idea behind resource leveling is to reduce wastage of resources i. Project manager will identify time that is unused by a resource and will take measures to prevent it or making an advantage out of it.
Critical path is a common type of technique used by project managers when it comes to resource leveling. The critical path represents for both the longest and shortest time duration paths in the network diagram to complete the project. However, apart from the widely used critical path concept, project managers use fast tracking and crashing if things get out of hand. Fast tracking - This performs critical path tasks.
This buys time. The prominent feature of this technique is that although the work is completed for the moment, possibility of rework is higher. Crashing - This refers to assigning resources in addition to existing resources to get work done faster, associated with additional cost such as labor, equipment, etc. Resource leveling is aimed at increasing efficiency when undertaking projects by utilizing the resources available at hand. Proper resource leveling will not result in heavy expenditure.
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