Loading Activities with Resources
Including resources in a schedule helps management compute total labor and equipment hours, calculate total project and per-period cost, resolve resource conflicts, and establish the reasonableness of the plan. A schedule without resources implies an unlimited number and availability of resources. Resource information can be stored within the schedule files or it can be stored externally in separate software, but a best practice is to store resources in the schedule itself.
Fully loading the schedule with resources, including materials, equipment, direct labor, travel, facilities, equipment, and level-of-effort activities, provides the basis for the performance measurement baseline (PMB), which can be used to monitor the project using earned value management (EVM).17 When a schedule is fully resource loaded, budgets for direct labor, travel, facilities, equipment, material, and the like are assigned to both work and planning packages so that total costs to complete the program are identified at the outset.
How detailed resource assignments and duration estimates are varies by how detailed activities are in the schedule. Work scheduled for the near term should account for specific resource availability and productivity. The level of detail for resource loading should be based on the information available to management as well as the purpose of the schedule. Detail schedules used for day-to-day management should include detail resource information, while summary or intermediate level schedules with higher-level resource information may be more appropriate for analyses such as an integrated cost-schedule risk analysis.
Because milestones have no duration, they should never be assigned resources. Additionally, for the scheduling software packages that include them as an option, summary activities should not be assigned resources. Summary activity durations depend on the activities contained within them.
Activity owners responsible for managing the day-to-day effort and the most experienced team members who will be performing the work are the best source of resource estimates. Activity owners must be able to explain the logic behind their resource estimates; if there is no justification for allocating and assigning resources, the schedule will convey a false accuracy. Estimated resources within the schedule should also reconcile with the cost estimate. The assumptions for resources and related activity cost should be the same as those that are used in estimating activity duration. The basis of estimate (BOE) is the connection between cost and time and should be kept up to date as assumptions change. If durations, resources, or productivity rates change, the cost is also likely to change, and they need to be coordinated. Both the schedule and the cost estimate should be thoroughly documented to include underlying resource assumptions for the entire estimated scope of work.
In terms of labor resources, a schedule can be loaded at different levels of detail, each level having its advantages and disadvantages. In some cases, a program may rely on a centralized resource pool, previously approved by management, that must be used as the detailed work schedules are populated. Assigning labor resources to activities at the name level (“Bob Smith Jr.”) is specific and allows management to track the effort of individual people and to make sure they are not overallocated. This is particularly useful for tracking the assignments and responsibilities of subject matter experts whose absence or overallocation could delay an activity. However, assigning individual names to activities requires constant updating and shuffling of assignments for such events as vacations and sick leave and it reduces flexibility in resource leveling. Individual name assignments may also require specific labor rates, although planners may simply enter the average rate for each employee to obviate the need for this.
Assigning resources at the organizational level such as “agency test department” or “production facility staff” is quicker than assigning individual names to activities. However, organizations include multiple skill sets, which may complicate allocating and assigning specific skill sets to activities. Assigning resources by skill set (“software engineer level 3”) may be more time consuming than organization-level assignments but is a compromise option for resource loading to avoid both too much and too little detail. Skill sets obscure specific labor rates, parse individuals’ skills, and allow for management’s rearrangement of individual personnel within skill sets.
Resource information can be stored within the schedule files or externally in separate software such as in systems devoted to financial management or manufacturing resource planning.18 If resource information is stored and maintained outside the schedule, how information is integrated between the schedule and the resource management software must be clear. Specifically, managing resources outside the schedule requires a procedure in which resource assignments are fed back into the schedule to reflect the separate resolution of resource issues. A best practice is to store the resource information in the schedule. Unless resources are stored in the schedule itself, the effects of resource availability must be manually updated, increasing the likelihood of error. In addition, managers and auditors can more easily identify and verify critical resources if resources are stored in the schedule file. Finally, if resources are not stored in the schedule, resource leveling will be difficult.
Case study 7 provides an example of a fully resource-loaded schedule and its alignment to the program budget baseline.
After the schedule is resource loaded, total resources in the schedule should be crosschecked with the program budget and contractual cost constraints. Crosschecking can be performed at the summary level by rolling up lower levels of the schedule to key high-level milestones.
The cumulative resources and budget can be visualized graphically as a series of peaks and troughs of resource and funding availability. Resource peaks should be examined for feasibility regarding the available budget, availability of resources, and timeliness. For example, scheduled activities may call for 70 software engineers, but actual facility or administrative constraints may prevent the staffing of more than 40 software engineers simultaneously. The benefits of using a schedule to reallocate resources can be seen in the example of house construction in figure 24.
Figure 24: A Profile of Expected Construction Labor Costs by Month
The expected labor costs peak severely in November, corresponding with a surge in carpentry and bricklaying work, as well as final grading, landscaping, and pouring concrete for the patio, driveway, and sidewalks once the exterior house work is complete. The labor budgets then drop substantially for December and January, creating potential cash flow issues for the owners or the general contractor. However, final grading and landscaping need be completed only by the time of the owner’s walkthrough, not scheduled until late January. As a consequence, those activities have over 30 days of total float available; that is, the final landscaping and concrete pouring activities can be delayed until December without delaying the owner’s acceptance. This shifts nearly $14,000 in labor costs from November to December, easing the budget concerns in November and allowing work and cash flow to ramp down smoothly into January (see figure 25).
Figure 25: A Smoothed Profile of Expected Construction Labor Costs by Month
Peaks in the resource profile often occur before major decision points in the program. If the cumulative overlay of resources against major milestones shows resource peaks just beyond major milestone points—rather than just before—then resources may have to be reallocated.
Resource assignments should also be carefully reviewed for realism in light of assumptions made by the scheduling software. Depending on how resources are assigned and durations are estimated, the scheduling software may ignore resource overallocations by allowing assignments to continue beyond resource availability. For example, if only three carpenters are available to perform cabinetry work but four are assigned to the activity, the software may allow four carpenters and simply mark the activity as overallocated. In reality, a fourth carpenter is not available and the duration of the activity would have to be extended.
While resource loading the entire schedule may be a difficult exercise, it encourages management to assess the amount of resources available and encourages a discussion of difficult questions early in program planning. If the resource-loaded schedule alerts decision makers that the available resources will not suffice to execute the work on time as planned, management can begin negotiating for additional resources early in the program. Finally, linking available resources to activity durations may expose infeasible durations to scrutiny or show opportunities to reduce durations with the application of more resources. See Best Practice 4 for more information on establishing durations for activities. Case study 8 illustrates how optimistic resource assumptions can delay a program plan.
Our analysis of the Integrated Fixed Tower (IFT), Remote Video Surveillance System (RVSS), and Mobile Surveillance Capability (MSC) project schedules related to the Arizona Border Surveillance Technology Plan found that two minimally met and one did not meet the best practice of assigning resources to activities. In particular, our analysis concluded that the MSC schedule did not meet the best practice because it was not resource loaded at any level. Program officials stated that they did not estimate resources for the MSC schedule because they developed the schedule under the assumption that the activities were to be fully resourced to do the work and that personnel would be dedicated and not shared between the other programs in the Plan.
A schedule without resource assignments implies an unlimited number of resources and their unlimited availability. If allocating and assigning resources are not justified, the schedule will convey false accuracy. This is particularly important where resources are in in multiple projects sharing critical resources. In fact, as the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Technology Innovation and Acquisition (OTIA) initiated and continued work on the Plan’s programs, it shared resources such as personnel among the programs, in part delaying them. For example, with regard to the IFT program, OTIA officials stated that sharing a contracting officer with another program was necessary. Further, OTIA officials told us that because of resource constraints associated with initiating the Plan, the development of two acquisition documents—an acquisition program baseline and life-cycle cost estimate—for the MSC program was deferred because the IFT and RVSS programs were given higher priorities. In addition, for the IFT and RVSS programs, officials delayed planning and deployment activities because of resource constraints and the lack of dedicated contracting officers to plan and execute the programs’ source selection and environmental activities.The performance measurement baseline is the time-phased budget plan for accomplishing work. For more information on the relationship between cost, schedule, and EVM, see appendix III.↩︎
Manufacturing resource planning (MRP) is a software system designed to improve resource planning by using an automated information management system that provides planning, scheduling, capacity, and other information.↩︎