PMI - Community Post

25 April 2008

Multi-Project Resource Leveling Can Be a Juggling Act
By Jack Duggal, MBA, PMP

This feature was inspired by a Community Post suggestion box entry from a PMI member who is juggling limited resources across a set of multiple projects.

Multi-project resource leveling is like playing a complex version of Sudoku, a popular logic-based puzzle where you place unique numbers on a grid. While allocating resources you have to juggle limited resources (numbers) between multiple projects (grids).

However, unlike Sudoku, in resource leveling you have to deal with the added complexity of multiple project priorities and varying skills and characteristics of available resources.

One way to deal with the complexity of resource allocation is to rely on tools. Most project management software tools have varying degrees of resource management functionality built in.

Sophisticated applications will even have enough facilities to let you establish resource priorities and limits. They may also generate a comprehensive report to let you analyze the tradeoffs.

Still, project mavens will often shake their heads in puzzlement if you ask them how to get the tool to deliver the right results. You can spend a lot of time setting different options and priorities in the tool but the software may fall short of doing what you hoped for.

The tool cannot read your mind and is not intuitive enough to deal with all the complexity of resource leveling, so it may delay the tasks that you don’t want to touch and ignores the tasks that should be delayed.

Resource scheduling can be a very involved process. Software tools are a good start, but most ways to manipulate tasks and resources require decisions based on knowledge and expertise. It is important to understand the limitation of resource scheduling tools.

The following tips can be helpful in resource scheduling of multiple projects:

Know your priorities. Resource scheduling entails two approaches – resource-limited scheduling and time-limited scheduling. The basic concept is simple; you can either recruit extra resources to meet the overload, or stick to the resource limit and delay the project’s finish date. The first step is to identify and prioritize all the time-fixed projects and determine and schedule resource assignments for these projects.
Identify available resources for remaining projects and determine the least available resource. Resources have different skills, abilities and constraints that are not often interchangeable. Some are more in demand then others. Identifying the least available resource can help in identifying one of the critical constraints while building a realistic multi-project resource schedule.
Build realistic buffers and catch-up time. This is important because resources may have more dependencies and linkages to other projects and tasks in multi-project environments. That can have a ripple effect across mutiple projects.

Using your knowledge of your organization resource environment, you will have to consider several possibilities of levelling and reassigning as you try to find the optimum solution to your multi-project resource levelling puzzle. The key is to use tools coupled with your experience and knowledge of your organizations’ multi-project resource constraints, priorities and skills availability.

Mr. Duggal is a PMI SeminarsWorld^® leader, managing principal of Projectize Group LLC and leader of the seminar Building the Next Generation PMO and Portfolio Management. For questions on the content of the seminar, please contact Mr. Duggal.