MS Project Resource Levelling with Practical Example | Microsoft Project Tutorial
Resource leveling in Project Management is a technique to adjust the schedule by changing the task start and/or finish dates based on the availability of resources and priority. This is a case when you have a resource constraint in a project. This way it helps you to make a realistic, and achievable schedule.
According to PMBOK resource leveling is “A technique in which start and finish dates are adjusted based on resource constraints with the goal of balancing demand for resources with the available supply.
While scheduling a project, it is of paramount importance to know your weapons before you plan. If you have a constraint for a particular resource unconsidered, your schedule will not represent the correct picture. Rather it will jeopardize the whole plan without a piece of information, and the Project Management team will wonder why!
If you have the information while preparing the schedule that you are going to get only one excavator, you could prepare the schedule somewhat differently. You could plan the excavations of two structures at the most suitable times. The time that you lost by not being able to do the task simultaneously in two structures could be managed by increasing other resources depending on the reduced duration.
The same is true the other way around. If you know that you are planning for more resources than actually required you can save costs by reducing some.
So let’s check how to do this to get an edge over the other Project Planners.
Resource leveling is done when scheduling the production of available resources is limited, resources to use in an optimal way.
For example, say you have a requirement of 2 excavators in June, 1 in July, and 3 in August. You should plan in such a way that all 3 months require the same quantity of resources, without much variation in the month-wise requirement.
In Microsoft Project, it is always advisable to adjust the project schedule within the total float of the project.
The total float of a project is the total amount of time that a schedule activity may be delayed from its early start date without delaying the project finish date, or intermediary milestone.
When you level resources, the leveling process should not extend the project duration as projects are time-bound. Hence, adjusting or leveling resources must not defer the project finish date.
In this tutorial, we will show you two methods of resource-leveling. The first one is to do it manually, step-by-step, by understanding the constraint and checking the requirement.
Second, we will use Microsoft Project to understand a real-life example of resource leveling and will show how to deal with it while preparing the project schedule. Microsoft Project has an option to automatically deal with the issues of resource leveling, and we will see in-depth how that works.
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