# Introduction

Whether you have an abundance of resources or barely enough, you want to make sure that your resources are fully occupied during their normal working hours. An underworked resource might take a bigger bite out of your budget than out of the workload. An overworked resource can burn out or become a bottleneck. Your aim is to distribute the work so that each resource can work at optimal capacity (though some overwork and underwork may be unavoidable).

Often, the biggest challenge you have is that some resources are overallocated. When a resource is overallocated, it is assigned to do more hours of work in a given time period than it has available on its resource calendar. Your main task, then, as you fine-tune the resource assignments in your schedule is to identify and resolve resource overallocations.

By default, Microsoft Project looks for overallocations on a day-by-day basis. For example, if a resource with 8 available hours per day is assigned to work 10 hours on one day, Microsoft Project will indicate that the resource is overallocated on that day. You can choose to look for overallocations within a different time period, such as week-by-week. Then, if a resource has 40 available hours per week, Microsoft Project will indicate an overallocation only if the total number of work hours assigned to the resource in a 1-week period exceeds 40 hours. For instance, you can assign the resource to work 6, 12, 8, 4, and 10 hours per day in a work week without tripping the overallocation alarm.

Resource overallocations can be resolved with three strategies, which you can use singly or in combination:

- Adjust task properties.
- Change assignments.
- Modify a resource’s working time.

Before you act to resolve a resource overallocation, be aware of possible trade-offs, such as projects taking longer. Decreasing the percentage of resource units assigned to a critical task, for example, may correspondingly increase that task’s duration. If this also makes the finish date later than required, you may have to look at other strategies for resolving resource overallocation.

This chapter presents methods and solutions to common resource allocation problems.

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