PMBOK® Guide: Resource Optimization - Resource Levelling & Resource Smoothing

when we're developing shedule initially we just try to figure it out who can do what kind of work and what kind of a dependencies the work item or activity has on each other but later we realize that few people are overloaded and few are under loaded and we need to do something about it this resource optimization process is bringing some optimization in resource assignment to the activities it is it is linked for human resource as well as for materialist resources now you may realize that you are planning a party and there are five friends who you are but you are planning who will do what and you may realize that one friend can do multiple things and in a first level of planning you allocate so many works to him but he based on what he can do and based on how the activities are related with each other and then you realize oh god he's overloaded now we need to do something about it and then you are doing something about this you are doing resource leveling now there are two concepts for resource optimization one is called resource leveling and another is called resource smoothing so let's let's talk about how how does it make how we can understand this particular thing well so let's take an example of a critical path method first and see the context where it this may be relevant so you may have an activity a activity B and then you may have something called activity C and finally the project gets and it so you have and here now all these activity takes 8 hours assuming so they are all eight hours work so you write a DARS and this is how they are dependent on each other so you are located a one person say name Raj - activity a as well as activity B and you may allocate it say say David on activity C now you thought this can be started on the day one and get finished on day one and this will finish on day two the work is over in two days but when you look at an allocation you realize that Raj is working for 16 hours on day one and it can't be done even if activity beak and starting parallel with activity a there is no limits there is no inter dependency among them but since the person is saying this flow will not work and you may end up changing this activity like more or less like a serial you may create activity a then activity B and then activity C and this may change your project duration from two days to three days and you say ok 8 hours 8 hours 8 hours and you have a start and you have and so when you do a resource leveling your project duration may getting backed it because the new interdependencies may get discovered because of the poor resource constraints yes these two activity could have been done in parallel but only Raj can do it and so we have to do it in Syria and that is what the resource leveling is all about in most of the tools when you create your critical path method when you feed your data it allows you to view something called resource histograms so what the resource histogram does it whatever information you have here from in your activities and people allocation and it creates an histogram of amount of work or an hours the person on a daily basis is is allocated something like this so this could be there is a day so you may have a day 1 day 2 day 3 day 4 day 5 and this one is ours so this might be you you may say that this is a tarz and this could be somewhere 16 hours so you can see that there is a chart which shows that people are allocated at how many hours now when you do a resource leveling you know that nothing can go beyond it so you need to trim this and bring it somewhere down you can't just work with this you do and that is why it is called lava lake you have limited that person can only work for 8 hours so you need to remove these things now how do you remove these Peaks you remove these Peaks by either adjusting the activities or by by allocating these work to someone else so you end up doing this particular leveling no assuming that you you perform the resource leveling and the new schedule came up is that these activities got added somewhere here somewhere here like this and something like this so you remove this by changing the project should do now nothing is going beyond 8 hours and the new thing is something like this and this increase the project duration from 5 6 7 8 days now the work will finish in 8 days but work is is leveled look this particular individual is not marking more than 8 hours this is a leveling now what is smoothing then now swooning says that ok we are not increasing the project duration beyond 8 ours we have leveled it it can walk but can we give this guy a breathing space we are consuming all the tiny Attar's but a one particular day he is only working for 5 hours another particular day is only working for 4 hours so can we do something so that somewhere he can be working somewhere at six seven hours consistently all the time so it is like bringing the desired smoothness in work allocation but if it impacts the project she do we won't do it so it's like we have made we have done the leveling and now we are giving a finishing touch so that person has better breathing space and it can he can take care of more uncertainties so we look at the project shedule again and see that can we bring this somewhere up and can we bring some of the work little bit down not if not all and something like this can go so if this can happen again we are not violating the eight-hour rule but in some cases we are bringing the work allocation below six hours or seven hours whatever desired are you have without impacting the overall schedule timelines overall critical path duration is not getting changed now we may not be able to achieve this movie all the time there are some cases where he's working eight hours and nothing can be done about it because if you try to do something about it projects should already impacted so you won't do anything you will leave that leveling is like masked because this is it he can only work for eight hours how can you allocate him for 12 hours you need to remove that four hours smoothing is yes he is intended to work for eight hours I wanted to give him a work for seven hours in some days I can do it in few days I can't that's what is about smoothing so this all these two are two techniques we put under the umbrella of something called resource optimization the sense is is simple once we have a project scheduled in our view now we want to make sure that the people the material resources are optimized during the project duration they are used at an optimum level so that we have a less risk on our projects and this is what we do in resource

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Keywords: PMP, PMP exam, PMP certificate, PMI, Project Managment Institute, project manager, Resource Histogram, Resource leveling technique, Resource Smoothing Technique, resource optimization, human resources, CPM, Critical Path Method, dependencies, resource optimization in project management, resource optimization techniques, resource optimization techniques pmp, resource levelling, resource levelling in project management, resource smoothing and resource levelling, project management

Id: 64Z__faxcr0

Length: 8min 5sec (485 seconds)

Published: Sun May 12 2019