“A very clean, quick wake-up call. Provides arguments for not using the critical path only.”
—J. Cattell, Cardinal Health

“Very good. The hands-on activity was very enlightening.”
—B. Huey, Sogeti

“Perfect amount of information and delivery in a short time. Excellent handout. Great interaction and participation with the audience.”
—K. Schuster, Thomson Reuters

“Excellent, informative and absolutely in touch with the real world in which project managers live and work.”
— L. McGeorge, South Carolina Federal Credit Union

Do you ever wonder why your project schedule is a pain to put together, a pain to maintain and sometiems doesn’t relate to what is really happening in your project? Project scheduling with limited resources is very challenging. However, if the project has resource constraints, the critical path method is a practical way to generate an impractical schedule. Thus, resource leveling is necessary to generate a valid project schedule. Additionally, when resource leveling is used, it usually extends the critical path schedule beyond the desired need date and the user is left in a quandary.

Every project manager should understand the “real world” fundamentals of resource leveling. In order to gain this fundamental knowledge, the good, the bad, and the ugly of resource leveling are presented.

After this presentation you will know more about project scheduling than ninety-nine percent of all project managers and PMPs on planet earth.

Takeaways

• The critical path is academic in most shared resource work environment scenarios
• You probably don’t know the real critical path and even if you do it is probably different next week.
• In a shared resource environment you should focus on the critical resources instead of the critical path.