Hi Everyone,
I am working in MS Project 2016 professional. My question concerns leveling.
I have a couple of strategic projects that our R&D department is working on in an one planning. In this planning every stratgic project is a summary task, not a subproject. These strategic project may have in some cases have a predecessor/successor connection but in most situations this is not the case.
When I use the leveling option (week to week basis) then Project resolves quite a lot of over allocations but doing so it stretches individual task of a summary task over a very long period of time leading to an huge durartion time of this summary task or project.
This may give the most effective resource usage but for other reasons I do not want one task being scheduled in feb. 2018 and the next one in dec. 2018 and another somewhere 2019.
Is there a way to control this without losing the leveling functionality of Projects.
Many thanks for any advise.
Martin
Hello Martin,
First I would suggest ensuring that you have adequate logic ties within your projects and that you have applied a Deadline to the completion milestone for each project. That's because MSP's default leveling heuristics give a higher score to tasks with lower Total Slack.
Next you could tinker with your leveling options, e.g. a) Level only within available slack; and b) Leveling Order - Priority, Standard.
In general, most projects are truly resource constrained, so the first option may not resolve the overallocations as much as you would like. With the second option, you can control leveling results mainly by applying values to the Priority fields of individual tasks. All tasks are created with a priority of 500 (i.e. Neutral) on a scale of 1000. If two tasks are competing for the same resource, then the task with the higher priority is scheduled first, and the other task is assigned a Leveling Delay. A task with priority of 1000 will never be assigned a Leveling Delay, but it can be delayed if its logical predecessor is delayed by leveling.
Good luck, tom