Leveling - overview

Leveling is required to distribute the work assigned to employees in a reasonable manner based on each employee's existing workload and future availability. Leveling is used to make sure that employees do not have too much work scheduled for a given day, week, month, etc. Leveling is also important to determine a project's expected finish date.

The following topic describes (1) how to level a project's resources and (2) some of the rules and factors used when leveling.

How to level a project's resources:

Leveling should be done:

• After all assignments have been made.

• Before a project is published.

• After modifications to assignments or hours are made to a published project.

1. From the Project Scheduling view, click the Level button on the toolbar.
   
   An option to Clear all Start Constraints is offered when one or more tasks have an established start constraint date. A task's Start Constraint is the forced date a task is scheduled to begin regardless of resource availability or other task dependencies. When leveling, a task that has a Start Constraint is not adjusted and other tasks are scheduled to work around it. This option does not clear task assignments that have both Start and Finish date constraints.
   

2. Review the project's revised schedule, budget and resource allocations. Project Statistics are available in the lower left corner.

3. To keep the leveling results, click the Save toolbar button . Note that the leveling results are saved but the assignments are not available to employees until the project is published (or re-published).

Tip: You can level a project at any time while making assignments to get updated allocations and timelines.

Notes:

• You can level and publish with placeholders.

• When leveling an employee's workload, all of the employee's available working time is used to schedule the work. To leave the employee some free time for other concurrent projects, read about the Employee Target Allocation function.

• You can print the project plan by clicking the print button located in the Chart section of the toolbar.

Notes:

• A Start constraint can be set by either dragging the task bar right or left within the Gantt area, or by checking the task's Start at box in the task's properties.

• When more than one employee is assigned to a task, the estimated hours may not be evenly split between the assigned employees after the project is leveled. The leveling function distributes the employee effort to get the earliest end date possible for the completion of the task. In some situations, it may even occur that some assigned employees have no estimated time against the task.

• When leveling using a placeholder, the default employee working time calendar is used.