What is resource leveling in MS Project and should you use it?
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What is resource leveling?
You have a project with several tasks, and resources assigned to those tasks. Some resources are assigned to multiple tasks, which has resulted in some overallocated resources. Resource leveling is the act of taking a resource-loaded schedule, and making it so that they don't have to work overtime. The main goal is to have a critical path that is corrected for resource dependencies. Furthermore, all other tasks and deliverables should have reliable plan dates correctness.
Manual resource leveling
Manual resource leveling means that you reassign or take action to resolve this. MS Project also has a feature that evaluates your work and resource allocations, and adjusts your schedule so that your resources have no over allocations.
Should you level the resources yourself or have it done by MS Project?
A question we hear quite often. If you have a tool at your disposal, why wouldn't you use this? A reason could be that you do not fully trust the tool yet. MS Project could come back with some strange results, but whether it does, totally depends on whether you have checked the completeness and of your schedule's network logic (dependencies or links). If for instance you did not use a dependency to indicate that ‘reviewing document’ has to take place after ‘writing document’, resource leveling might put the order incorrect since it solely relies on the leveling algorithm.
