This chapter discusses a variety of tasks and techniques that the project manager must use when managing the project schedule. Tracking and reporting the project, as well as resource leveling, are discussed.
Resource Leveling
The schedule of activities is constrained by the availability of resources. If you apply the resource calendar to each activity to be sure the people and equipment are available on those dates, you can still miss an important constraint. If there are several activities that use a particular person's time on the same days, that person could end up with too many activities scheduled for the same days and very little on other days. If key people are overloaded, the activities to which they are assigned might not be completed on time. Managing the schedule of activities to ensure that enough resources are available to complete each task by distributing the workload is called resource leveling. Activities to which that person is assigned and that have free float can be delayed to reduce work overload of key people.