The following examples will provide you with a succinct overview of how to allocate workload and get full control of it.
Suppose you have an 8-hour working day and a task that is estimated to be completed in 24 hours 1. Once you assign this task to a project participant, you will see in the Workload window that this person has 8 hours each day distributed between 3 working days 2.
This is a perfect workload distribution.
Now, suppose that you have two tasks that are estimated to be completed in 24 hours within the same timeframe each 3. If you assign those tasks to one project participant, his or her workload will be 16 hours per day 4 which is a clear overload.
If you hover over the cell with workload hours, you will see a window indicating that a person is loaded with 16 hours from 8 hours available and how many tasks are assigned to him or her 1. If you click on the cell with workload hours, you will be able to see all the tasks that are assigned to a person 2 on that particular day with hours breakdown.
To properly distribute the workload, you may need to reduce the hours that a person will spend on a task. Here, there are two options. The first one is to click on the cell with workload hours under the task bar and enter the number 1. The second one is to click on a task bar 2 and adjust the hours in the emergent Task settings window.
Note that with those changes task duration will remain the same, but the estimation will be modified automatically 3.
Once you adjust the number of hours with the actual working schedule of an assignee, the workload cell will turn green 1 which means the workload is optimal for that day. The estimation will be modified accordingly 2.
Note that when you reduce or increase the working hours of the assignee, the estimation is recalculated automatically. However, the task may require a fixed amount of time to be completed. In that case, reducing the workload of the assignee solves the problem of overload, but you still have to reallocate the rest of hours. It can be done by engaging more resources, managing task priorities, assigning more people, extending the duration or by any other means.
Since you can work with many projects in parallel, GanttPRO lets you take into consideration the workload of team members from all the projects while you manage the workload in a particular project.
Therefore, if you assign a task to a team member in one active project, it will be displayed in his or her workload in any other project.
For that, you just have to choose All active projects in the Workload window.