7. Create a Resource Loading Plan

How can you involve your team members in the planning process. How do you identify and assign resources to tasks and avoid availability problems? 

eview your preliminary task list and develop your resource loading plan.

Get commitment for availability from your team members and resources. You don't want to schedule anyone for a task if they are not going to be available while that task needs to be worked. A good way to get commitment is to ask everyone to give you a calendar with conflicts and prior commitments clearly marked. You can reference these calendars during assignment to minimize conflicts after the project is started. Check on availability of non-human resources as well.

Assign individuals to the tasks.  Everyone should have had an opportunity to review and provide input to the plan. The task timings, relationships and sequences should be finalized. Now you can assign responsibilities for the tasks to individuals. Ideally, there should be one individual per task, but if this is not possible, then assign one individual as the responsible person. Your resource loading plan should indicate which resource is responsible for each task completion. Below is a task table with resource names as used in Microsoft Project.

Task Table with Resource Assignments

Assign generic resources if the work is sub-contracted.  Add resource identifiers to tasks to indicate which resources will be responsible for completing the work.  You needn't name individuals. Instead you can use a skill or job title as the resource. For example, painter, framer, bricklayer, programmer, clerical, etc. 

Adjust the task durations and costs based on the assigned individuals. You may find differences in the labor rates or cost of resources with different skill levels and should consider that a task may take longer if the assigned person has to learn on the job. You may want to go through your resource loading plan identifying such areas and making adjustments where necessary. You'll only need to do this on effort-driven tasks. If the task is duration-driven rather than effort-driven, no adjustments will be needed. Examples of effort and duration-driven tasks are:

Effort-driven: Painting a room
Effort-driven: Writing a press release
Effort-driven: Designing a publication layout
Duration-driven: Waiting for paint to dry
Duration-driven: Attending a class
Duration-driven: Operating a trade show booth

Task List with Cost Columns Added

Not all resources are people. A resource may be material, equipment, or facilities that are purchased, rented or shared with other activities. So, for example you may assign a truck, a workshop, a conference room, a backhoe, airline tickets or hotel accommodations to particular tasks. All of these can have costs that must be considered in the project budget. If you add these to your resource loading plan, it can help you guard against double booking a room, or scheduling a vehicle in two places at once.

Guard against overloading a resource. You want to be sure that you don't have anyone scheduled to be in more than one place at the same time or working on two or more tasks simultaneously. You'll have to monitor this closely once the project is underway, as well. Sometimes if a task slips or runs longer than anticipated, this kind of conflict can occur. You'll want to make appropriate changes in the schedule to handle them. Furthermore, you'll find that resources are not 100% efficient, therefore you shouldn't try to allocate 100% of their time. A wise project manager rarely allocates more than 75% of a resources availability. If you try to pile on too much work, your resource loading plan  will be useless.

 - Jake Alexander

Next in the series: Scheduling Cost and Tasks