Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Resource leveling is an obscure term in project management. It is, however, paramount to project success.

You are planning a project or planning some work that involves a limited number of people. You lay out all the tasks that must be performed and record all the resources needed to perform each task. Resources include:

• people
• time
• objects (test equipment, computers, offices, tools, etc.)

You are not ready to begin work. First, you should perform (trumpet blast) resource leveling. This is where you examine which resources are needed at what time. Resource leveling tells you things like:

• Bob will work 92 hours a week for the first month of the project
• Your only delivery truck will be used by 16 different people everyday between noon and 3PM
• Ten people will use your drill press Monday at 10AM

These are not good situations. You are over-using some resources. You are in an impossible situation where time, space, matter, and other such laws of physics will destroy your project.

Resource leveling means you have to straighten out this mess.

For Bob, you will try to:

• find other people who can do the work Bob is scheduled to do
• move some of Bob’s work to the second month of the project
• eliminate some of the tasks Bob is scheduled to perform

You do the same for the other over-scheduled resources.

If you don’t level the work of your resources, you will have people standing around pointing fingers at each other and saying things like, “If you touch that drill press I will fill-in-the-blank-with-something-you-wouldn’t-want-to-see-happen.”

Resource leveling isn’t much fun. You have to decide what to do; you have to decide what is more important. No, not much fun. The result of avoiding resource leveling is even less fun. Please do it.