Basics of Resource LEVELING

10 Nov Basics of Resource LEVELING

Resource Leveling is one of the concepts that the planners get ask to perform it as part of the resource loading practice. The Process can be complicated and to achieve sensible results, more than one scenario needs to be analysed and demonstrated.  Still the outcomes have to be reviewed and presented to the project management team to make the most appropriate decision based on the cost benefits of the scenarios. In this article, we will walk through some of the basics of Resource Leveling in Primavera

Let’s consider a project with three activities and one resource with 8 hours Max Unit/time availability has been assigned to the activities. As the screenshot below shows the resource is over-allocated by 16 hours/day (24-8=16)

When Resource leveling is undertaken, results will be as follows. As it displays, P6 shifted the activities, without any logic between activities, as per the resource availability then eliminates the over-allocation.

Now, after changing the budgeted units of activity A1000 from 40 to 80 hours and adding predecessor to A1020, the schedule will be same as the following image. As per the allocation, activity A1000 requires 16 hours per day and A1020 needs 8 hours / day (in total (24 hours/ day ). As a result, there is 16 hours over over-allocation /day in 1^st week.

After the leveling, the result will be as per image below. The over-allocation is still exists but reduced from 16 hours to 8 hours. The reduction in over-allocation is due to shifting the activity A1020 by P6.

So, why is the over-allocation is not resolved? According to the Leveling log file, activity A1000 could not be leveled and activity A1020 has been delayed due to leveling.

The Max Unit /Time of the assigned resource is 8 hours/day and activity A1000 requires 16 hours/day. So, because the duration of the activity is fixed, P6 could not eliminated the over-allocation. In this scenario, to remove the over allocation, either the duration of the activity should be extended to 10 days or Max Unit/Time of the resource has to increase to 16 hours per day.

To learn more about Resource Loading and Leveling, click here