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Optimization of Project Plans 

Optimization of the project plan should be a continuous improvement activity that should be done on a regular basis. Estimates for work and duration should be updated regularly along with the relation ship changes among the activities, if required. Critical Path analysis should be done on a regular basis. The following key things should be considered.

1. Monitor and analyze the changing critical path activities due to changes in the schedules of activities.
2. Doing tasks in parallel and creating concurrency in the tasks where possible, especially for the critical path activities.
3. Adding resources in the right places and at the right time. Making sure that resources are utilized 100%. We should monitor the plan on a regular basis and review the allocation of resources. If some resources are unacceptably over allocated or under allocated, we should optimize to the resources to more evenly distribute the workload without impacting the end date for a project.
   1. Identify over allocated or under allocated resources
   2. Account for over allocations by adding more overtime (This may be done in an actual project scenario). This does not resolve over allocation but ensures that resources have the time to work on the assigned tasks.
   3. Account for over allocation by leveling feature of Microsoft project, which should even out the resource workloads, this feature should be used with caution. Since Leveling feature reschedules by using available slack time, splitting tasks, and / or adding delay until the over allocations are resolved, leveling might extend the project’s finish date, which is usually not a very desirable thing. We should use this feature with caution in the project as well as in any future projects also.
   4. Specify resource availability by adjusting the resource’s availability for the overall project. We can change the dates when the resource starts and finishes work. We can also change unit availability or % availability at varying periods throughout the project.
   5. For some projects we might use holidays and vacations as working days.
   6. Change the work by reducing the time planned for the over allocated task. We should make sure that the reduced duration still reflects minimum realistic estimates.
   7. We might also delay or split the task manually until the right resource is available. This should also be done with caution so that any dependent activities are not affected and delay the overall project timeline.
   8. We might need to adjust the assignment of tasks to resolve over allocation or assign available resource(s).
   9. We should also resolve resource under allocations by adjusting resource availability, modifying what is assigned to that resource or assigning more, removing overtime if assigned to that resource or change task duration in some instances.
4. We should always log changes to the project plan that are done for optimization. These log or notes should be useful during tracking actual progress or even for collecting data during any future similar projects.
5. Evaluation of the results of resource optimization should be done on a regular basis to ensure that indeed we did resolve resource allocation problems and that the finish date, planned costs, and other projects were not adversely affected by these changes. Impacts to the other projects can be communicated electronically if we are using Microsoft Project Server or Microsoft Project Web Access but if not than it should be communicated to all the dependent projects.
6. Any efforts to the Project Plan optimization and the changes as a result of it should be communicated to all the concerned parties, especially the resources whose task assignment is changing. If we are using Microsoft Project Server or Microsoft Project Web Access then the communication can be done electronically by broadcasting and publishing the message to the concerned parties including the Project managers of the all the dependent projects if we are using a standalone version of Microsoft Project or similar tool we should have to communicate the changes as per the process of the organization.

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