Advice for the Project Management Professional (PMP)

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FIGURE A-59 Resource Allocation View
3. Close the file, but do not save any changes. Click File on the Menu bar, and
then click Close. Click No when you are prompted to save changes.
The Resource Allocation view can help you identify the source of a resource
overallocation. It is not obvious that Kathy has an overallocation the first day of the project
because she is only assigned to work a total of 5.57 hours. The problem in this case is that
she is assigned to several tasks that day that were entered with durations of hours, and
Project 2007 assumes each of those tasks starts as soon as possible, thus resulting in the
overallocation on an hourly basis. You could ignore this problem or fix it with resource leveling,
as shown in the next section. By using the scroll bar, you can view information for
other resources. If you scroll down to look at Mary’s resource allocation information and
scroll to the right to reveal August and September, you can see that overlapping the design
and implementation tasks may have caused another overallocation problem. To fix the problem,
you can have Mary work overtime, assign another resource to help, or reschedule the
implementation task to reduce the overlap. You can also determine if resource leveling,
as described in the next section, will help solve the problem.
Resource Leveling
Resource leveling is a technique for resolving resource conflicts by delaying tasks. Resource
leveling also creates a smoother distribution of resource usage. You can find detailed information
on resource leveling in the Help facility.
To use resource leveling:
1. Reopen the baseline file. Click File on the Menu bar, and then click the filename
baseline.mpp, to open it. Notice by the last milestone on the Gantt chart
that the project is projected to be completed on 11/16/09.
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Guide to Using Microsoft Project 2007