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SCHEDULES BASED ON RESOURCE AVAILABILITY

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Chapt.9 SCHEDULES BASED ON RESOURCE AVAILABILITY
by suraj yadav

RESOURCE: Resources are the main power, machine, information, etc.


through which the work is actually carried out.

The final step to putting together the project plan is to assign the resources
according to the schedule developed.

Resource leveling is a process that the project manager follows to schedule how
each resource is allocated to activities in order to accomplish the work within
the scheduled start and finish dates of the activity.

The resource schedule needs to be leveled for two reasons.


1. To ensure that no resource is over-allocated. That is, we do not schedule
a resource to more than 100 percent of its available time.
2. The project manager wants the number of resources (people, in most
Cases) to follow a logical pattern throughout the life of the project.

RESOUCES CAN BE COMPARIED TO FUNNEL.

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ACCEPTABLY LEVELED SCHEDULE:

It is very unlikely, perhaps impossible, that you will develop a resource schedule that
simultaneously possesses all the desirable characteristics we discussed. 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.

Resources are not available to work on an activity 100 percent of any given day. Our
current observations show that this number ranges between 50 and 65 percent. This
value, for a typical average day, is the resources maximum availability.

Ideally, we want to have a project in which all resource schedules can be accommodated within
the resources’ maximum availability. On occasion this may not be possible, especially when
project completion dates are paramount, which means that some overtime may be necessary.
We’re all familiar with this. Overtime should be your final fall-back 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.

RESOURCE-LEVELING STRATEGIES
You can use three approaches to level project resources:
■■ Utilizing available slack
■■ Shifting the project finish date
■■ Smoothing

UTILIZING AVAILABLE SLACK


Slack Is the amount of delay expressed in units of time that could be tolerated in the
starting time or completion time of an activity without causing a delay in the
completion of the project. Recall that slack is the difference between the ES-LF
window of an activity and its duration. For example, if the ES-LF window is 4 days
and the duration of the activity is 3 days, its slack is 4 – 3, or 1 day.
Slack can be used to alleviate the over-allocation of resources. With this
approach, one or more of the project activities are postponed to a date that is later
than their early start date but no later than their late finish date. In other words, the
activities are rescheduled but remain within their ES-LF window.

Shifting the Project Finish Date


Not all projects are driven by the completion date. For some, resource availability is
their most severe constraint. On these projects, the critical path may have to be
extended to achieve an acceptably resource-leveled schedule. This case could very

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well mean that the parallel scheduling on the activity network diagram that moved
the original finish date to an earlier one needs to be reversed. The start-to-start and
finish-to-finish dependencies might need to be set back to the linear finish-to-start
type. In some cases, a project is of a low enough priority within the organization that
it is used mostly for fill-in work. In that case, the completion date is not significant
and doesn’t have the urgency that it does in a time-to-market project. For most
projects, however, moving the finish date to beyond a desired date is the least
attractive alternative.
Smoothing
Occasionally, limited overtime is required to accomplish the work within the
scheduled start and finish dates of the activity. Overtime can help alleviate some
resource over-allocation because it allows more work to be done within the same
scheduled start and finish dates. We call this smoothing, and through its use, we
eliminate resource over-allocations, which appear as spikes in the resource loading
graphs. In effect, what we have done is move some of the work from normal
workdays to days that otherwise are not available for work. To the person doing the
work, it is overtime.

WORK PACKAGES
When organization completes all JPP session activities. The project work has been
defined as a list of activities; activity duration and resource requirements are specified,
the project network is built, the activity schedule is done, and resources have been
scheduled. The JPP session attendees have reached a consensus. Whew, that’s a lot—
and you probably wondered if it would ever be finished. There is one more step to go
before project work can commence—that is, to define the work to be done in each
activity but at the task level. As activities are made up of tasks. The work to be done
within an activity is called a work package. This is really the final test of the feasibility of
the schedule and resource leveling decisions. The work package is a statement by each
activity manager as to how he or she plans to complete the activity within the
scheduled start and finish dates. It is like an insurance policy. For the project manager,
the work package is a document that describes the work at a level of detail so that if the
activity manager or anyone working on the activity were not available (if he or she
were fired, hit by a bus on the way to work, or otherwise not available), someone else
could use the work package to figure out how to continue the work of the activity with
minimal lost time. This safeguard is especially important for critical path activities for
which schedule delays are to be avoided.
A work package can consist of one or several tasks. They may be nothing more
than a to-do list, which can be completed in any order. On the other hand, the
work package can consist of tasks that take the form of a mini-project, with a
network diagram that describes it. In this case, work packages are assigned to

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a single individual, called an activity manager or work package manager. This


manager is responsible for completing the activity on time, within budget, and
according to specification.
PURPOSE OF A WORK PACKAGE:
It describes in detail the tasks that need to be done to complete the work for an
activity. In addition to the task descriptions, the package includes start and end dates
for the activity.

The work package also can be adapted to status reporting. Tasks constitute the
work to be done. Checking off completed tasks measures what percent of the
activity is complete.

FORMAT OF A WORK PACKAGE:


We recommend two work package documents.
Work package assignment sheet. This is a very special type of telephone
directory used as a ready reference for the project manager. It contains
some basic information about each work package and its manager.

Work package description report. This is a detailed description of the


activity plan. It contains much of the same information that is found in a
project plan, but it focuses on activities, not projects. It is therefore a much
simpler document than a project plan, even though it contains the same type
of information as the project plan.

Work Package Assignment Sheet


The work package assignment sheet, shown in Figure, is a report for the
project manager only. It includes the earliest start and latest finish times for
each activity. This sheet is one of the few resources available to the project
manager and should not be made available to anyone other than the project
manager.
The work package assignment sheet has limited value in smaller projects but can
be invaluable in larger ones. For example, our business was once involved in a
project that consisted of more than 4000 activities. Over the seven-year life of the
project, more than 10,000 activity managers were involved. This report became a

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phone directory that needed constant updating as team members came and
went.

Work Package Description Report


A work package description report is a document prepared by the activity
manager in which he or she describes the details of how he or she will
accomplish the work of the activity.

Once the project plan has been approved, it is the activity manager’s responsibility
to generate the work package documentation. Not all activities will require or
should require work package documentation. The documentation can be limited to
critical path activities, near-critical path activities, high-risk activities, and activities
that use very scarce or highly skilled staff. It is the project managers who will decide
which activities need a work package description report.

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The descriptions must be complete so that anyone could pick them up, read
them, and understand what has to be done to complete the activity. Each task
must be described so that the status of the work package can be determined
easily. Ideally, the task list is a check-off list. Once all the tasks have been
checked off as being completed, the activity is completed. Each task will also
have a duration estimate attached to it. In some project planning sessions,
these estimates may have been supplied as a bottom-up method of estimating
activity duration.

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