So far, the project manager has a first guess about duration, cost, and personnel and other resources required for the project and a preliminary project schedule. The next step is to combine these and prove if the project schedule can be accomplished with the available resources.

Before you proceed, please read chapter 5, pp. 235-249, of the textbook (Wysocki 2009).

The current project schedule defines the schedule for each activity. Each activity has to be performed within a defined schedule: between earliest start date (ES) and latest finish date (LF). But this is a preliminary assumption, not taking into consideration the available resources in terms of personnel. The following examples might happen:

• According to your preliminary schedule, there might be three activities in parallel, e.g., in project month 5. But that requires 5 programmers at the same time, which are not available. On the other hand, in project month 4, no programmers have anything to do.
• There might be other projects, where your personnel are also partly engaged. Exactly in project month 5, your programmers are urgently needed in the other project.
• You might have a sufficient number of programmers in your company – but only statistically. Due to other obligations, programmer A could only work on activity 1 and 3, programmer B could work on activity 2, 5 and 6, and programmer C would have to fill in for activity 4. Instead of one programmer working constantly in a certain area of the project, three programmers would have to get acquainted with the project, and handing over the work from one activity to another would require lots of communication.
• You have to engage an additional programmer for the project. But he might only be working on the project from project months 1-2 and 6-7. What do you do with a paid employee for the rest of the time?

Therefore, the available resources in terms of personnel have to be leveled. Wysocki (2009) suggests strategies for leveling resources:

• Utilizing available slack (compare also previous section)
• Shifting the project finish date
• Smoothing (basically, planning overtimes for your employees)
• Re-scheduling of activities by
  • Further division of activities
  • Stretching activities
  • Assigning additional personnel.

However, resource leveling has an impact on the costs. Obviously engaging additional personnel will increase the costs, but also other measures, e.g.,

• Planning overtime for your employees
• Alternating work of two employees in the same area
• Playing high risk by a very tight project schedule – in case of delay, penalties for late completion might occure.

More detailed project planning is required on the micro-level. “Micro” means in this case to break down the activities to the very lowest level and align the activities with concrete persons, dates, responsible persons, descriptions of work, and other information. Wysocki (2009) suggests two templates on the level of the lowest activities (in his termination work packages and tasks):

• Work package assignment sheet (see fig. 5.6)
• Work package description report (see fig. 5.7).

In order to see other templates, please have a look at the following templates used in the EC project “Bridge-it” (although the work package descriptions are on a higher level):

• Work Plan
• Work Package Description
• Deliverables List