How to represent changes on efforts % for a specific resource over different tasks?

Question

Scenario: John Doe is 100% allocated to the task 'vacations' from 01/Dec to 01/Feb.

He's doing great (a lot of efforts to wake up at 11AM!), but during 20/Dec to 30/Jan John needs to be 50% 'vacations' and 50% Christmas.

Christmas (for John) is not part of vacation at all. He needs to stop enjoying his newspaper on his couch and go shopping for hours and hours.

The Gantt Chart would be something like this:

                01 Dec | 10 Dec | 20 Dec | 30 Dec | 01 Jan | 10 Jan | 20 Jan | 30 Jan
Vacations 100%  =====================================================================
Christmas  50%                   ========

The 'something' is the problem: Between 20 to 30 Dec, John is 150% allocated, but the piece of paper where I track his work has only a single start date / end date. I see some options:

• Split the task 'vacations' into two pieces, one where he's 100% allocated and another with the 50% allocation
• Change his allocation day by day and manually set the overlapping days to 50%
• Have my notebook magically understand that when John is allocated to two tasks, he cannot work 150% for that specific period of time.

I'm not versed on tracking efforts on piece of papers, so there might be a simple and elegant solution for this (I believe) normal resource allocation scenario.

Hope to have software-agnostic answers, even though my piece of paper comes from Microsoft.

Answer 1

Have you tried leveling? It will reduce the over allocation by either reducing the work in hours or extending the duration, depending on which you fixed. Personally, I'd manually fix the hours because I do not like the auto function, but that's just me.