Critical Chain and Resource Leveling

Example used: Air Control Project, Gray and Larson, pp. 277-281. The example I have used in this note is the Air Control project discussed in Gray and Larson textbook in pages 277-281. The MS Project entries for this project are:

The Gantt chart is:

Note that Ryan is the resource for tasks 3 and 5 and they overlap. But this may not be obvious in a large project. But you can check the load on every resource in MS Project using available commands. Select Resource Usage under View menu to see:

There is a clear indication of overload for Ryan in the info column. To the right of this view (not seen in the figure above) there is a listing of daily load on each resource. You may also view Resource Graph by choosing Resource Graph under View menu. Press the Enter key to toggle through all resources. You will see Ryan has 200% load during the week of Jan 23.

Resource Leveling Command

To level the load for Ryan, click on Level Resources command under the Tools menu. In the dialog box that appears,

click Level Now button. You will see the Gantt chart change to:

Activity 6 has been delayed to start after the end of activity 3. As a result, the project has been delayed, but Ryan is not overloaded anymore. There is much more to how MS Project does the leveling. An important control that the user has on leveling is the use of Priority for tasks. Priority numbers assigned to tasks can be anywhere between 0 and 1000. The default value is 500. When two or more tasks compete for a resource, the one with the least priority number will be delayed or split. For details on priority (and splitting) of a task, see the online manual for MS Project.

The Critical Chain

Note that MS Project shows task 4 as critical but not task 3. Strictly speaking, task 3 is critical and the critical path now is 1-3-6-7-8 which determines the new project duration (50 working days). But many people call 1-4-6-7-8 as the critical path and 13-6-7-8 as the critical chain, and explain that the critical path ignores resource constraints while critical chain does not. The critical path in their opinion assumes infinite resources.

Viewing the Changes

You might want to see what changes were made due to leveling. For this purpose MS Project has the Leveling Gantt Chart view. After a leveling command is executed, you can select the Leveling Gantt Chart view by selecting More Views under the Views menu. In the list that appears, Select Leveling Gantt and click on the Apply button. In the present case, you will see:

See how the delaying of Task 6 to level Ryans load, and subsequent delays in Tasks 7 and 8 are shown in this view. If you do not like the changes for whatever reason, you can clear the changes using the Clear Leveling command in the dialog box for Leveling Resources seen above.

Jay Sounderpandian December 2004