From the course: Project Management Foundations: Schedules

Lengthen, delay, or split assignments - Microsoft Project Tutorial

From the course: Project Management Foundations: Schedules

Lengthen, delay, or split assignments

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- [Instructor] After you assign people to activities, you have to make sure people's workloads stay as steady as possible. By avoiding workload peaks and valleys, people work more efficiently and productively. There are three basic ways to even out someone's workload; lengthening, delaying and splitting assignments. Lengthening assignments can be an easy fix when someone is overloaded. When that person has a few concurrent assignments, you might increase their duration so the person works fewer hours on each assignment each day. In the sample project, the graphic designer has two one week tasks scheduled at the same time, capture screenshots and draw illustrations. Increasing the duration of these assignments to two weeks allows the graphic designer to work on both of them half-time. Delaying one or two of the person's assignments is another way to balance their workload. Delays work well when assignments are short. Delays also help the person stay focused and productive. That's because most people can only juggle up to three assignments before their productivity decreases. Let's use a delay to eliminate the graphic designer's overload. Instead of assigning the designer to work on both things at once, delay one so they occur one after the other. Splitting a longer assignment into pieces is a good solution when you need to squeeze a short but important assignment in. In the example, Jane Salvez is scheduled to write chapters for five weeks. Suppose she has a two-day review scheduled in the middle of that assignment. You can add a split to the five week task so she can wrap up the review and then get back to writing. When you manage resource workloads, be sure to document the decisions and solutions you use so people understand why you applied them to your schedule. Lengthening, delaying and splitting assignments all help even out people's workloads. You can use them alone or together to make your project schedule as effective and realistic as possible.

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