1

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.

Improve this question
1
  • +1 Love the fun use case in your question. Technically, he is being over-allocated at 150%, and the system is telling you so. There are cases where you don't want the system to adjust allocations; you want to know that a resource or dependency is over-allocated. This is a feature (or possibly a misfeature) that is giving you the wrong result for your specific use case. :)
    – Todd A. Jacobs ♦
    Feb 21, 2014 at 2:03

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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.

Improve this answer
1
  • Thanks for the tip, David! I'll read about and see how it'd work in my piece of paper. Cheers!
    – Tiago Cardoso ♦
    Feb 22, 2014 at 3:21

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge that you have read and understand our privacy policy and code of conduct.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.