Microsoft Project Tips Weekly

- [Bonnie] Hi, Bonnie Biafor here. Sometimes the over-allocations you want to remove are still there after leveling resources. In this tip I'll show you how to correct factors that prevent project from leveling resource over-allocations. The first thing we're gonna do is scroll down through this task list. And we're gonna look in the indicators column for the red people icons that show that resources are over-allocated.

And you can see that there are several tasks throughout this project schedule. So we're gonna go ahead and see what might be preventing project from leveling these resources. The first one to look at is date constraints, things like must start on or must finish on. The best practice is to avoid these in the first place. But the other reason to avoid them is that project can't level tasks that have these constraints.

You wanna change them to a more flexible constraint like as soon as possible. There's an easy way to look for tasks that have these types of date constraints. I'm gonna right click the duration heading and then choose insert column. The field I want to insert is constraint type. Now that I have that field in the table, I can click the down arrow to the right of that column heading. And then I'm gonna turn off the checkbox for as soon as possible.

That's a flexible constraint and I don't care about those. I want to look at these other constraints that are inflexible. When I click OK I get this fairly short list of tasks that have completely inflexible or partially inflexible constraints. The two serious offenders, task 29, signed venue contract, is set to must finish on. In addition, event day task 90 is set to must start on.

Well, I'm gonna go ahead and click the cell must finish on for task 29. In this case I really look at this. I don't see a reason for this constraint type. I can click the down arrow and choose as soon as possible. That gets rid of that constraint. Then let's go down to task 90. In this case, yeah, the event day does need to start on a particular date. However, just for the sake of the resource over-allocations, I'm gonna remove this inflexible constraint.

I'm gonna click the down arrow and choose as soon as possible. I'm gonna leave these other partially inflexible constraints in place and we're gonna level resources and see if they're really causing a lot of problems. If they are you could always remove them. Also, something to keep in mind, if you have your project set to schedule from the project start date, if you add as late as possible date constraints, those also will prevent leveling.

Let's go ahead and remove this filter. I'm gonna click the funnel icon in the constraint type heading and then click select all and click OK. Project also does not level tasks that have a priority value of 1000. If you use priority then let's add the priority field to the table and look for any tasks set to 1000. I'm gonna right click the constraint type column and choose insert column.

This time I'll add the priority field. I can go ahead and use that same filtering technique. Click the down arrow in the priority column. You can see I've got two values in the list, 500 and 1000. So there are some tasks with that value. I'm gonna clear the 500 box and click OK. In this case it's good news. There's only one task with that value.

The solution is really simple. Just don't use 1000. You can use 999 to still have a really high priority, but it won't impact resource leveling. Also, if you manually add delays or splits to a task that has a priority of 1000, the clear leveling command won't remove your manual changes. So really, it's a good idea to not use that value 1000 unless you absolutely have to.

Now let's go ahead and remove this priority filter. I'm gonna click the funnel icon, turn on the select all box and click OK. Project also cannot delay tasks that have already started. But it can split remaining work. To make sure that this doesn't prevent leveling, we're gonna go to the resource tab, and in the level section click leveling options. In the resource leveling dialog box you wanna go down to the leveling order and look at the checkboxes underneath that.

Make sure that the check mark is turned on for leveling can create splits in remaining work. It is turned on here. So we're good to go on this front. Go ahead and click OK to close the dialog box. If you have problems leveling resources and you cannot find a reason why, there are a couple of other fields that you might not even know exist that will prevent project from leveling resources.

For tasks, I'm gonna insert the two fields that control leveling. I'm gonna right click one of the column headings and choose insert column. The one field is called level assignments. And then I'm going to right click again, insert another column, and the second one is leveling can split. So if you're having problems with mysterious lack of leveling, go ahead and click this down arrow to see if there are any no values.

If there are you can filter to see those tasks and change those no values to yes. In this case, we're good to go. No values here. Same thing goes for level assignments. If I click the down arrow in that column, there are no no values. There's one other field that could be a problem. And to see that one I'm gonna go to the view tab and then in the resource views section click resource sheet.

I'm gonna insert a column so I right click a column heading. And the field that I want to look at is can level. You wanna make sure that your work resources are set to yes. Now in this case when I click the down arrow, there are some no values. So let's just take a closer look. I'm gonna turn off the yes checkbox and click OK. What I see is that the material and cost resources are set to no.

And that's fine. Those don't level. It's the work resources you care about. So in this case these no values are perfectly fine. We can click the funnel icon, turn the yes back on, and get back to our full resource sheet. Well, let's go ahead and see if we've removed all of the issues that prevent leveling. I'm gonna go on the view tab to the very left and click the Gantt chart button. Then I want to go to the resource tab, and in the level section I'm gonna click the button level all.

Now in this case I do get a message, and it says that there's an over-allocation that can't be resolved and it tells you information about that. Well in this case I'm gonna go ahead and click skip all. I just wanna see what the leveling does and how many problems there might be to deal with. So I click skip all. Now I can scroll down to look for those red people icons. There's one. That's the only problem that I have in this project.

So at this point I can just look at this task and come up with a way to resolve this over-allocation. And now you know how to correct several factors that prevent project from leveling resource assignments.