Resource Loading: Is this practise correct and acceptable?

08 Nov Resource Loading: Is this practise correct and acceptable?

The Schedule development is a complex process which requires many data, calculations, skills and knowledge. Even, if the data is available, most of the Planners fail to accurately develop. Many Planners try to come up with a sensible solution but when they get checked in detail, many inaccuracies are discovered. We did discuss one of them (assigning direct resources to LOE or WBS summary) in a  previous article (see it here). In this article, we will discuss another practice which seems widely used and accepted as a correct process.:

To demonstrate this practise, the following activities will be used:

TThe Planner sets the settings as per below. As per the setting, the planner selects “Day” for Units Format and doesn’t show the unit label

Thereafter, creating a resource pool, the assignment gets started. For example, for activity A1670, a Civil Engineer, a mechanical Engineer and a Designer gets assigned. Then, the planner says to complete this activity, because there will be 1 Civil Engineer then the budgeted unit will be 1, there will be 1 mechanical engineer then budgeted unit will be 1 and for the designer, the budgeted units will be 2 because 2 designers will work on it! The same logic gets applied for other activities. The results will be the same as the table below:

and in the schedule the resource loading will be as follows:

For construction activities, the same process gets applied and the resources get assigned as per the following table:

After the assignment of resources in the schedule, the results will be as follows:

Apparently, everything looks correct hence the practice should give the correct output. However, when the Units Formats get selected to Hour and Show Unit lable gets ticked, then P6, shows the budgeted units in hours.

The budgeted units in P6 will change to the following:

So, the budgeted units in hours indicate that the construction of a 30m3 foundation takes 25 days and requires 24 hours (8 _{hours working / days} × 3 _{Civil labor resource} = 24).

The budgeted unit is not the number of the resources that will be working on the activity. The Budgeted units is the man-hours that are required to complete the activity’s scope of work. Also, in the real projects that the schedule has several hundred activities, it is almost impossible to identify how many laborers will be working per activity.  So, this is another incorrect practice.

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