Resource Levelling and Schedule Crashing
The Gantt Chart
Resource Levelling:
Projects will often be confronted by time and organizational constraints that limit their ability to obtain human resources. Sometimes staff can be supplemented through temporary help from technical service agencies. When staffing requirements are identified and constraints are understood, work plans can sometimes be adjusted to fit requirements to available resources.
Resource scheduling is one of the greatest challenges for projects without access to large organizational or job-market resource pools. Project planning should address such issues as redundancy of critical resources, resource capacity, bench strength in vital areas, and contingency plans to handle departures of key personnel.
Most of the popular project management software packages enable the project resource planner to assign staff to project tasks, display resource requirements profiles, and adjust the schedule of slack tasks so resource requirements more closely fit those available in the organization. Some packages can display multiple project resource requirements to facilitate organization-wide resource management, optimization, and leveling. Individual project requirements may be adjusted by manipulating schedule slack in tasks not on the critical path. This can facilitate allocation and leveling of staff throughout the organization.
Unless one person is working on each task full time, the schedule duration on the Gantt chart will not be the same as the effort required. Effort requirements will drive project cost, but durations will drive the schedule. These distinctions are helpful when reconciling project and resource schedules.
"Crashing" the Schedule:
Efforts to accelerate a project schedule are commonly grouped under the term "crashing" the schedule. Maybe this term was coined to suggest that there is always some price for driving a project to completion sooner than normal. There are a number of ways to improve the schedule when your boss says, I need it sooner!
1. Add people to the schedule. Additional staff must be added early in a project or they will slow it down while learning the ropes. If you add people, you may also need to add staff for supervision and coordination, so staff are fully applied.
2. Improve productivity and work longer hours. A good team atmosphere with management support can help make this happen. Without positive nourishment of this process, you could lose your team to attrition.
3. Review schedule dependencies and look for opportunities to overlap tasks or make serial tasks concurrent or parallel activities. This requires greater coordination and sometimes involves increased risks which need to be managed carefully.
4. Review the project scope and remove or delay features or functionality from the project critical path.
