Allocating Project General Resources

You allocate to activities trade supervisors  that are to be assigned to a limited number of activities per day, that every day must dedicate some minimum time to a limited number of activities.  Usually a trade supervisor overlooks a limited number of crews within his trade and his time is spread among the activities the crews are assigned. In this way you will make sure no over allocation of his time is scheduled especially during the periods when some activities require more of his time. If you do not assign the trade supervisor and at some point you increase the number of crews without checking or reassigning the supervisor time you might over allocate this resource. 

Project level supervisors such as the PM whose amount will be fixed no matter on how many activities are performed during the day are usually assigned to general overhead activities [in such cases it can be a hammock] as with these you do not have to check on his specific assignment. These project level supervisors will be assisted by the trade supervisors you have to make sure will be available enough time to supervise the assigned activities on a minimum number of hours per day. 

It would be wrong not to check on the trades supervision time, on the other hand it makes no sense to assign project level supervisors to all activities.

If a trade supervisor comes out to be over allocated the resource leveling will delay some activity(es) to solve the issue, if the allocation is critical and delays the job then you can solve the issue in several ways, and fortunately most can be set up to be automatic. One option can be to temporarily bring external assistance and increase the availability in your model through activity resource production that moves with the activities, another option can be to use assistance from other similar trade supervisor or even from a project level supervisor using more advanced allocation such as a combination of skills, resource priorities, phase priorities and automatic variable allocation of other available project level resource.

You schedule the activities and resources in your CPM the same way you do it on the field, it is a simple rule your software shall be able to model. It shall be easy and transparent, let the software do the math on thousands of activities. 

the question is, is it good practice to allocate a supervisor to all the activities in the programme that  he is suppose to supervise in a day; no  supervisor is going to stay in an activity for 2 hrs (for example), then jump to the next activity for another duration in hours, then to the next activity(ies) untill he completes the 8 hours or 10 hours in a day.  A supervisor usually is involved in more than one activity schedule occuring concurrently, and only for a shorter duration than the tradesmen involved in the execution of the activity.

The Supervisor is an indirect cost and, IMO, not necessary to include in the schedule (at least not for purposes of communicating work priorities to the field).

Although I do not have P6 I believe the key must be in units per time, it is on h/d or hours per day instead of percentage. A default value can be set up for each resource, I would recommend it to be 8 h/d or your full day. Then on every allocation change it to be the particular value. 

It does not shows by default so on the resources tab you must make the column visible and there is where you assign the individual values. 

Mike,

You said " no matter what the planner says he will follow his own judgment and this will be reflected in the As Built records"

This is the result of poor schedules, perhaps because of poor resource loading and leveling functionality of some software out there that cannot do well even the most basic things. Mathematical modeling, operations research [said to be of British invention] and optimization are advanced tools that are too much for some software developers.

Take a look at the following resource partial resource assignments as done at the jobsite, easy and transparent.

As you can see part time assignments not only applies to equipment such as a crane but also to whole crews such as Reinforcing Steel crew that are assigned part time and within this assignment the Reinforcing Steel supervisor works part time. Functionality got to be easy and transparent otherwise doing this for hundreds of activities would be impractical.

Best regards,

Rafael

Hi Rafael

By putting the supervisor on the hammock you are spreading his time over the period when the trade is operating.

Any changes in sequence in the tasks will be reflected in the hammock.

You already know my views on resource levelling - I would never allow the software to screw up my programme.

In any case it is the job of the supervisor to iron out bottlenecks and prioritise resource allocation - no matter what the planner says he will follow his own judgement and this will be reflected in the As Built records.

Best regards

Mike Testro

I would do this by assessing the supervisor to trade ratio required, e.g. 1 supervisor to 10 tradesmen.  Then allocate a supervisor resource to each activity in budgeted units on that same ratio from the total budgeted units for the relevant tradesmen resources.  You then see from reource utilisation where/when the supervisor would be over utilized or use that resource to level if it is a limit.

Raymund,

The following is part of a typical crane allocation on a job to be presented in a Court Claim, two motor cranes on hundreds of activities. Can be more complicated if a whole crew is allocated part time and within this time some crew components work part time of the time the crew works, this is common of the reinforcing steel crew assignments on this job that works part time on elevated slabs and the supervisor checks only a percentage of the time the crew is working.

It would be of help if you model the very simple job I provided before so others can learn how to do it using P6. Latter for the benefit of Abdulhafiz we can go to the slightly more complicated partial assignments such as variable assignment of idle personnel.

If you can help us I would appreciate it very much.

It will also give me a preview of what to expect in our court case if the other side decides to run the model using P6.

Best regards,

Rafael

Resource Curve will do or assign the resource in all activities and set the remaining units/time as required...

units/time will be the number of hours that the supervisor has to supervise the said activity in a day. the total units from all activities shall be 8hrs.

Mike,

It wont do it. If you want to make sure the resource is not over allocated you got to distribute it on the individual activities and run the resource leveling. Otherwise it can be that hundreds of activities requiring a limited number of supervisors are scheduled to occur at the same time when the resources do not have enough time to cover all activities.

In addition the resource leveling algorithm do not level resources assigned to hammocks, what a mess if the same resource is assigned to hammocks as well as to individual activities.

Best regards,

Rafael

Hi Abdulhaviz

The easy way is to create a hammock from the tasks that the supervisor is covering and add the resource to the hammock bar.

Best regards

Mike Testro

It is an everyday allocation, very easy. You simply allocate your resource on a part time basis.

To make sure you got it right in case of more than a single resource you can try the following.

• Say you have only two supervisors available.
• That you need only one assigned 5h/d [part time 62.5% of an 8 hours workday] on Concrete Slabs, Footings and Mat Foundation.
• That you need only one assigned 30% of the day on Concrete Columns.
• That all activities can happen at the same time and last one week.

Due to resource limitation only two of the activities Concrete Slabs, Footings and Mat Foundation can occur at the same time. If this is what you got after resource leveling you got it right.