An incorrect & misleading resource loading practice…

01 Nov An incorrect & misleading resource loading practice…

If something incorrect gets repeated many times or if many people do it, will not be correct. When it comes to resource loading, many do it incorrectly and they keep repeating it on most Projects or even teaching others it in incorrect ways. They hope it will be considered and accepted as correct if many people do it the same way.

One of the incorrect practices is loading resources on to LOE or WBS summary activities. In this post, we will review this practise and demonstrate when it could be used and why it is not a correct way of resource loading.

1. It could be done and the output will be correct

There are 5 activities (A1 to A6) with FS relationship. The Activity L1 is a LOE that covers these activities.

Resources have been assigned to all activities as well as the LOE. The distribution of the budgeted units is illustrated in the following image.

The distribution of the units for the 5 activities and LOE is exactly the same, because:

• Activities are Finish to Start
• There is no gap between activities
• There is no in parallel activities.

In this type of situations, assigning resources to detailed activities or LOE that covers them, provide a same distribution and the S-Curves will be identical.

2- It should not be done and the output will not be accurate

In the next image, three more activities have been added. The overall duration and budgeted units for detail activities and LOE are equal.

The distribution of the budgeted units has been displayed below. As the image shows, the distribution of LOE is not the same as detail activities. For example, for 1st 2 weeks distributed units for LOE is 67 hours but for detail is 40.

So, LOE does not represent the detail activities distribution and as a result the S-Curves will not be different.

In the next image, there is gap between activity A3 and A4. The LOE represents the overall duration and budgeted units equal to the detail.

Checking the distribution illustrates that the LOE distribution is not the same as Detailed activities.

As a result, the S-curves will not be the same.

So, assigning resources to LOE or WBS summary will not necessarily represent the detail activities distribution. Therefore, it is recommended to not to use it. The Project control system and its output should be as accurate as possible otherwise it will mislead the project management team in taking inaccurate decisions.

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