How to allocate a manager to many tasks that overlap

Question

I have a project with a lot of work going on in different domains. Say one domain is Business Process. Each domain has a single manager, for example the Business Process manager. There are lots of other domains in this complex project too, but let's focus on just one to illustrate the problem.

There are lots of business process tasks that overlap across the schedule, and sometimes with gaps of time with nothing going on. For example:

---BP Task 1------
      ---BP Task 2------
           ---BP Task 3------
                                 ---BP Task 4--------
                                        ---BP Task 5--------

I want to allocate the Business Process Manager at 100% time whenever there are ANY business process tasks going on. This is also necessary to get a realistic costing.

I cannot allocate him individually to the tasks, since it would be a nightmare to level his allocation. For example, when one task is one week long, one two weeks, one three weeks, and they overlap in ways that move around as the schedule is modified. To edit his allocation to be 100% on some days on some tasks, 50% on other days between two tasks, and 33% on the days all three tasks overlap would be a nightmare, and much worse to keep it updated whenever any of the tasks moved.

Is there a way to say: "Whenever the following tasks say 10, 20, 30, 55, 80 are going on, the Business Process Manager should be allocated at a 100% level?"

I don't really care what the distribution is across the tasks, since he is a manager working all day long, and will shift his time between any business process work for a given day as any manager would.

I would rather not put all the Business Process work under a summary task and allocate the manager to that, because there are gaps in the schedule without any business process work going on, so the summary task length and therefore the cost would include all those gaps.

Answer 1

You're describing level of effort type work. For an individual like that, like a manager that bounces around based on demand, I would not load that person's hours against a specific task but rather against its own work package. I am assuming here you are building a performance management baseline. In this approach, this person would have separate codes and would charge those accordingly based on where she spent her time. Instead of loading hours equally across those various projects, you would apportioned time based on her predicted need across those projects, i.e., project A, 10%; project B, 30%, etc. And then capture variances as you progress.

Answer 2

From an accounting perspective, this manager is an indirect cost to any other project or workflow that (s)he touches, and therefore I recommend that it should be seen as a separate activity and cost-unit. You might be able to predict how often this manager might interact with projects X, Y, and Z and thereby loosely apportion his costs between them, but I do not believe that it is possible to express that in-advance in a project plan. The actual circumstances which will determine this person's activities and thus his project cost are uncertain and variable.

In the diagram you post, his costs are initially 33% allocated between Tasks 1, 2, and 3. But then, not only their demand but all demand stops briefly. Then, his costs are 50% allocated between 4 and 5. And presumably a short time later he might be juggling five balls at once.

The relative "busy-ness" of the various tasks might be one tool ... whatever causes the tasks to begin and to end, hence the probability that a particular task is now earning costs and what is the proportionate share of the available resource supply (cost) that they could be earning at any moment in time. ("You'd like to have 100% of my time but so would, at the moment, five other tasks ..." etc.)

So, cost-wise, I would allocate him separately, compute the cost of having him on the payroll, and then try to predict how the actual demand-pattern might fall between the projects (s)he's responsible for over the period of interest. The costs will be billed to each "internal customer" as the events actually take place. This person should keep a timekeeping app on his phone at all times.