Review Questions for Business Management Essay

1) What is resource overallocation? Resource leveling is the project management function of resolving project resource over-allocation. By definition over-allocation means that a resource has been assigned more work than can be accomplished in the available time as dictated by the resource’s calendar definition. In most scenarios, over-allocations can be remedied manually by extending tasks or moving them to accommodate the resource’s availability 2) What is resource leveling? When performing project planning activities, the manager will attempt to schedule certain tasks simultaneously. When more resources such as machines or people are needed than are available, or perhaps a specific person is needed in both tasks, the tasks will have to be rescheduled concurrently or even sequentially to manage the constraint. Project planning resource leveling is the process of resolving these conflicts. It can also be used to balance the workload of primary resources over the course of the project[s], usually at the expense of one of the traditional triple constraints (time, cost, scope). 3) Under what circumstances would you want to manually resolve conflicts? You can resolve resource conflicts or overallocations by using the resource-leveling feature in Microsoft Office Project. Leveling works by splitting tasks or by adding delay to tasks until the resources that are assigned to those tasks are no longer overloaded. Because of these changes to the tasks, leveling can delay the finish date of some tasks and consequently also the project’s finish date. When it is leveling, Project does not change who is assigned to each task 4) What would be the caution of adding more resources to a task to resolve resource conflicts? As you assign resources to tasks, Project checks the resource’s calendar to make sure that the resource is working. However, Project doesn’t assess whether the resource is already obligated when you assign the resource to a new task; Project enables you to make the assignment. Be aware, though, that the additional assignment may lead to overallocating the resource. Overallocation occurs when you assign more work to a resource than the resource can accomplish in the time that you’ve allotted for the work to be completed. 5) What would be the caution of rescheduling a task to resolve a resource conflict? To get the best performance and results from resources (resources: The people, equipment, and material that are used to complete tasks in a project.), you must manage resource workloads to avoid overallocations (overallocation: The result of assigning more tasks to a resource than the resource can accomplish in the working time available.) and underallocations (underallocation: Assigning a resource to work fewer hours than the resource has available.). If you change resource assignments (assignment: A specific resource that is assigned to a particular task.), check the effects of your changes on the overall schedule (schedule: The timing and sequence of tasks within a project. A schedule consists mainly of tasks, task dependencies, durations, constraints, and time-oriented project information.) to make sure that the results meet your project goals.