Project Levelling

Andy,



You mention you’ve written a paper on the subject of Automated Levelling. Is it available to read? I’d like to take a look myself,



Richard Rowberry

Andy



I came across lots of incompetent people making decision and driving company into chaos.



Sad ... but reality



Alex

Alex,

I take your point.



But what are we to do when the people who sell the system don’t understand the system??



I’m sure we’ll win one day.



Andy

Andy



I can understand the frustration of operate under the "Enterprise" environment. We (Planner) simply lost total control over what goes in to the system. But still you are lucky enough not been forced to use Enterprise system that cannot do basic project planning. System like SAP.



Still its the person who don’t understand the system caused the issues not the system itself.



ALex

Alex, You comments



"And as for the bad setting will give catastrophic effect ... well I guess the rubbish in rubbish out, the system will not give corrupted data, the person enter it will.



If the schedule is not planned correctly then of course you cannot get the desire result."



Are both correct, I would expect ’GIGO’, however due to the enterprise nature of the tool as planners/schedulers we must ensure that no one else touches the settings that we set to ensure our data is calculated in the propper manner.



The simple fact is that people with little or no "Scheduling" skills are operating Primavera in corporate "Enterprise" environments, and as such there is sometimes poor control over the global settings.



As for software that can do resource leveling, Vladimir has pointed out that Spider project can perform this task, other software can perform this function as well, one that comes to mind is Microplanner X-Pert;



It has an activity type called ’Elastic’ which will adjust the activity duration to finish.



The duration of this type of activity is determined by the planned start date and the capacity of the resource to be able consume the budget/remaining effort assigned to that activity.



Therefore if a resource suddenly becomes available, the scheduling algorithm adjusts the resource remaining effort accordingly to finish the activity in the shortest possible time without overloading the resource or compromising schedule logic.



Now on to the problem of getting Primavera to wash the dishes - :-)



Andy

Yes, Spider Project does it.

We call it variable resource assignments.

We do not require "putting the cart before the horse".

Regards,

Vladimir

Jeff, (and all others)

As far as I know, not one scheduling software can do by itself what you describe: assigning one resource to two parallel tasks part-time, then full-time when the first task is over

I agree that solution being proposed puts everything upside down, because you have to know the solution before you can ask the question, or "putting the cart before the horse"

Can I suggest you split the second task in two parts: one with the same duration that task one, the other for the rest of it: you will level easily the resource between tasks one and two

Vlad, does Spider Project have another solution?

Alexandre

Alex,

I have thought that calculating project schedule taking into account resource constraints is called resource levelling.



You wrote that "the system cannot automatic match the role with name resource, but that have nothing to do with resource leveling." I understood the problem differently - there was a need to reassign resources when one of the tasks was finished.



In any case please explain what do you call resource levelling. I hope that it is not about cleaning the dishes.



Regards,

Vladimir

Andy



You can ask Primavera clean the dishes for you as well, might try that one in the forum. See someone may give you a solution.



And as for the bad setting will give catastrophic effect ... well I guess the rubbish in rubbish out, the system will not give corrupted data, the person enter it will.



If the schedule is not planned correctly then of course you cannot get the desire result.



I do understand, the system cannot automatic match the role with name resource, but that have nothing to do with resource leveling.



Well! May be in the future we have a system that can read minds and tell people what to do next and deploy machinery and update progress and produce a accelerated schedule to finish the project in time.



Alex

Guys,

The first 2 points I made,



"As far as I’ve ever seen this is the biggest fault within Primavera."

&

"It is unable to resource schedule (properly)."



Reflect the issue at hand. This tool (Primavera) has lost the ability to schedule resources.



The company (Primavera) has turned the profession of scheduling - A noble art indeed - into that of a glorified MS excel technician.



The built in whistles and buttons within the tool have been designed to try and have a solution for all applications of planning and project management. The use of a single source tool in Project management would be akin to using the project manager to go out and drive the excavator that will dig the foundation pits.



We as schedulers should be asking for a tool set that provides us with the flexibility to do our job but at the same time enables us to prove that the answers are correct.



I have found so many things in the Primavera suite that cause problems, which can also create bad data, corrupt data, and unreadable data.



I have had colleagues question the validity of the data to the point where they wonder if they should increase their professional indemnity insurance, to cover errors that they may overlook due to the complex nature of the global enterprise settings, and the fact that a small change somewhere can have a catastrophic effect on a report that is using global data in its calculations.



You really don’t have to think too hard as a user of this software that given the opportunity to become involved with a claims process in court, that you really hope you’re not the defendant, but on the prosecution side so you can pull the schedule apart and find the one setting that the “Trained Operator” missed.



Scary thought but I reckon it’s not far off.



Vlad,

Your comment "your suggestion means that you know the schedule before resource assignments. What about automated resource levelling?"



Simply using this tool you need to know the answer beforehand because it cant give it to you.



If I’m wrong I would love to know how it does "Automated Leveling" I’ve written a paper on it and spent many hours trying to get it to work, and would relish in the chance to find out how it does it.



I’ve even had the Primavera Trainers in Australia become very interested in my paper as they don’t have much of a clue either (the ones I’ve met anyway)



So Pepsi challange time - Tell me how to get the system to do automated levelling that I can beleive.



Andy

Alex,

if I understood correctly your post it means that:

Project Planner shall create a model that describes the real situation. In this case the desired result - real life schedule (desired result?) can be achieved. Sometimes it is easy and sometimes it is more complicated.

Is my understanding correct or I missed something?

Best Regards,

Vladimir

Dear All,



My point still the same from the past posting to now "Reource levelling"



In resource levelling, there are so many different variables to the equations, and each scheduler requirements are different. In order to have the system do it properly you have to set all the parameters right to achieve the desire result.



In this case, its more complicated, because in certain situation a resource can be use between different activities within the same date, however, other situation it cannot achieve due to, location of the resource, work place agreements, OH&S, physical constraint. As a result, the driver of the software "Planner" need to set up the activities correct to ensure the plan is correctly reflected during the resource levelling.



System remains a dead piece of wood unless we applied our brain and wisdom.



HTH



ALex

Andrew,

your suggestion means that you know the schedule before resource assignments. What about automated resource levelling?

We call this problem as variable resource workload. When resources finish with one task they can be used full time on another.

Regards,

Vladimir

As far as I’ve ever seen this is the biggest fault within Primavera.



It is unable to resource schedule (properly).



What Anoon said is correct, you need to have your ducks in a row and make sure that your enterprise settings and everything effected by them is squared away before you go much further,

Units Per Time Period;

Calendars, which need to be set at Global Activity and resource so they talk the same language;

Resource availability (Default and Max Units);

Activity types;

Duration Types;



Then you will need to add the resource to the second activity twice;

The first assignment will be for 16Hrs @ 4hrs per day and the original assignment duration (not the activity duration) will need to be 4 days.

The second assignment of that resource goes in at I day duration @ 8 hrs with an original lag on the assignment of 4 days.



This will give you the summed profile that you are after.



You will need to add the columns to the resources tab view on the activity screen or the assignments view.



It’s a little convoluted but that’s how they expect you to drive this thing.



Hope this helps.



Andy

1. set Planning Unit in hours

2. set calendars, define resource calendars

3. set/assign resource units

4. run schedule and see what happens



BTW, what program is it?; what is the logic? SS with lag or FS with negative lag? are you going to use constraints?