#104 Resource leveling

[Toon Knapen]

Currently tasks are automatically scheduled after their
dependencies are finished (in case of finish-start
constraint at least).

But the resources on the task are not taken into
account. For instance two tasks could be scheduled for
concurrent execution even though the task is assigned
to the same resource for 100%. Thus although
task-dependencies are taken into account, resource
dependencies (or resource overallocation) is not.

So I would appreciate to have some possibility to ask
Ganttproject to level the resources, making sure that
resources are not overallocated. This will also
necessitate to add priority levels to tasks to allow
the algorithm to decide which tasks (for a specific
person) should be scheduled first.

[Felix]

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This is vital functionality. By automatically doing this is
saves a huge amount of frustrating manual editing any time a
change to resource allocation is made.

[drekbour]

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I second this. GanttProject does everything I need to
progress easily apart from this one feature. I will
continue to use the product (as a suported of OpenSource)
but cannot recommend it to anyone else until it comes of age
(IMO resource levelling is something that should have been
present before you could call the product v1.0 !)

[jago]

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Yes definitely this feature cannot be missing in a project
management tool.

[Chris Long]

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I'd also like to vote for this feature. I'd really like to
give up MS Project for an open-source (and multi-platform!)
alternative like Ganttproject, but not enough to give up
automatic levelling.

[Robert Krawitz]

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Resource leveling really is a critical feature for project planning. It can be emulated after a fashion by adding artificial dependency links, but once you get beyond one or two resources it becomes very hard to manage that way. It's the kind of thing you don't realize it's missing until you've used it, but once you've used it, there's no going back! When you're tracking a project, if you need to reassign resources, you want to see right away what that would do to the schedule.

Even without priorities, resource leveling is useful -- the tool can always use the order of tasks in the WBS to provide an implicit ordering.

Unfortunately, GanttProject is not alone in not having support for resource leveling -- the only FOSS project management tool I've found that does is TaskJuggler, which is too arcane for most people. However, to my mind this feature really makes the difference between something that can be used professionally (at least for things like software development by employees, where scheduling is more important than cost accounting) and something that can only be used casually.