Hi,

I have received request for help from one reader of my blog. The request is:

“Hi,
I’m trying to create a new schedule for 1 person. I’d like to find a way to use automatic scheduling that will fill the day and spread the task without spreading it in a crazy way.

For example, if I have a 1 hour recurring meeting every day, and a task that will take 24 hours, I’d like it to schedule the task to finish as soon as possible, with a break down of 7/7/7/3. Instead, it over allocates and does 9/9/9.

Are there any settings I can use to make it limit the allocation to 8 hours per day?

Thanks for your help.”

In this blog I will focus on resolving this particular problem. In the future I will explain problems with over allocation in detail.

I am going to setup the environment exactly the same as this gentleman has.

I will add one work resource with name MARC:

Now I will add a 1-hour recurring meeting:

and I will get:

Now I will add the second Task with a 3 day duration and I will get:

And finally I will assign my resource MARC to both tasks:

and I will get:

Marc is supposed to work 8 hours per day, and since he has a one hour meeting every day he is over allocated, and he will work 9 hours per day.

How can I make Marc to work only 7 hours per day on The Task, an let The Task to last 24 hours (3 days X 8 hours = 24 hours)?

Now I will choose Resource Usage View:

The easiest (but not the best) way to resolve over allocation is to insert (in work field): 7 hours per day for The Task at Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and 3 hours at Friday (see the picture below):

Now I will choose the Gantt Chart and you can see that Marc is not over allocated any more:

Another way of resolving over allocation for MARC is to add the Assignment Units column in the Resource usage View:

and I will get:

I want Marc to work 7 hours per day at The Task. If he works 8 hours per The Task it is 100% of Assignment Units. 7 Hours is 87,5 Assignment Units (7/8= 0,875 and it means 87,5%). I will insert 87,5 in the Assignment Units field:

and after I press Enter I will get:

You can see that I got what I wanted.

Those two types of over allocation resolutions are very simple if you have one resource, one recurring and one simple task, as I have. But if you have a lot of tasks, a lot of resources, and a lot of over allocations it will be almost impossible to resolve those over allocations manually.

I will show you a brief example of how to automatically resolve the over allocation conflict in my example. I will do it for a single resource (MARC).

First I will show the Resource Usage View again:

Now I will level single resource (MARC):

and I will get:

You can see that I got what I wanted.

There are other ways to resolve over allocation for more tasks, or resources, or entire project, but I will write a blog for these methods in a future.

When I was writing this blog I found a bug. But I will write about it next week.

I hope I helped my blog reader who sent me a request for help.

See you,