What is resource leveling?

[Lyndsy-Denk]

Having been a sys admin for a while—and having gone through boot camp even!—I feel silly for asking this, but I have to: Can someone explain what resource leveling is? I've scoured the documentation and nothing boils it down for me. Any mention of resource leveling in the documentation starts from the assumption that the reader knows what it is as a core concept and I just don't. Perhaps this is because I also don't have a history as a resource manager? Ultimately I'm trying to gain a better understanding of the difference between manual and automatic resource leveling, especially in regards to how it affects Workload Balancer.

[ChloeWY · Accepted solution]

Hi @Lyndsy-Denk , resource leveling is balancing the work evenly between all colleagues who are capable of doing the work. 

For example, let's say you have 3 CAD designers (Amy, Brian, and Chris) and 30 hours of CAD work that is currently distributed as:  

Amy:  20 hours

Brian:  8 hours

Chris:  2 hours

This isn't evenly distributed.  Chris will run out of work quickly, while Amy is overworked.  

What you want is for Amy, Brian, and Chris to each have 10 hours of work.  That keeps everyone busy and no one person is overloaded.  

[Lyndsy-Denk]

Thank you, @ChloeWY, this is helpful. So, because this is a setting at the project level, do I assume correctly that resource leveling activates only when there is more than one user of the same job role assigned somewhere in the project?

Overall, what are some examples or best practices of when you would use manual versus automatic resource leveling?

[ChloeWY]

Hi @Lyndsy-Denk , I understand Resource leveling from a project management standpoint, but we don't use the feature in Workfront because we generally only have one colleague for each job role assigned to a project.  

I would imagine automatic resource leveling would be better with truly interchangeable tasks.  But in reality, there may be differences in ability between your team members.  Or there may be groups of tasks that go together that may make more sense if one person does all of them.  In that case, you could start with automatic then fine tune manually.