Optimizing Workloads

• Is the total effort within the person hour budget of the project (if a person hour or person day budget is available)?

  You can find the total effort of the project by clicking Project Statistics on the Tracking toolbar and looking in row Current and column Work.

• Are the workloads for the resources reasonable?

  • We had to set arbitrary limits; the limits may differ for your organization. The workload for individuals should not exceed 150% of their regular availability within any week. The workload should not exceed 120% for periods longer than a week. These upper bounds may differ for your organization. We have arbitrarily set them at these levels to prevent burnout, attrition and dramatic loss of productivity.

  • The workload of consolidated resources (groups) should not exceed their availability.

  • The workloads should be fairly smooth, since there are hidden costs involved with erratic workloads. Seepage 471.

  Note that it is not enough to just check if there is any red in the Resource Usage view. MS Project often highlights more resources in red than are truly over-allocated. If there is an over-allocation during only one business hour, the resource will already be shown in red. Use the Go To Next Overallocation tool on the Resource Management toolbar to check the over-allocations. This tool is more selective and more reliable. However, even...