Hi,

yesterday I was teaching one of my Blog Readers about Leveling and Updating Projects in MS PROJECT 2013. The main problem was that after updating Project over allocated resources are still over allocated. I will explain the difference between those two things. I will not going to deep in Leveling in this Post.

Let me create The brand new Project:

and I will create one Resource:

Finally I am going to assign John to all Tasks:

Obviously, John is very, very over allocated.

Let say that John has Finished Task 1, and Task 4, and 50% of Task 2, and then he got Sick:

Now suppose that today is Friday, 13.03.2015, and we are going to update our Project to get Real Situation before we go home and spend wonderful weekend:

I will now update this Project:

and I will get:

as you can see, John is still over allocated. Why? Because I rescheduled Project after status date and get real situation. With this option you will never resolve Over Allocation. This is not a bug, OK, now suppose that I talked to John and I asked him why he got sick? The answer can be: “Because I am working far to much per day!” So I want to be sure that John is not Over allocated any more. Firs I will look at the Resource Usage View:

Now I know that John has to work 16 hours per day at Monday, Tuesday , and Wednesday. Now I will Level him:

and I will get:

As you can see John will work on Task 5, after Task 3, from Friday to Tuesday, and he is not over allocated any more. So there is a huge difference between Updating Project to status date versus Leveling Resources, and you should be aware of it.

Regards!