Allocation of % for days when tasks overlap in MS Project

Question

Is it possible to allocate less % to a person(say Alan) only for the days he helps Jorge as well as does his work? ie Say Alan has a task whose period is 6 days.And if Alan has to help Jorge for half the day on 3 days while the other half day he does his own task, can we then show him at 50% each for the two tasks on those 3 days, while on other days he is allocated 100% ? How does one calculate the % in such cases when there may be more than 2 overlapping tasks for a single resource. Thanks Pitre

Answer 1

No it is not possible to vary allocations in that way.

You have two pieces of data you can play with:

• A resource's max units (How much of their day they can work on the project)
• A resource's allocation (How much of their day they can be allocated to a specific task

You can prioritise one task over another, so that the allocated resources will attempt to finish it before lower priority tasks, before moving on to other tasks, but you cannot vary a resource's allocation to a task depending on what day it is.

You could split a task into multiple one-day chunks and vary a resource's allocation to those tasks, but the plan would quickly become a maintenance nightmare for anything more than a trivial number of tasks, particularly if those tasks started moving around in the plan.