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to work at full capacity, they might be working on several projects at once. Project A is in
the requirements phase, while at the same time, project B is in design, project C is in
development, and project D is being tested.
The trouble with this system is that no two projects take exactly the same time, and the
phases don’t always require the same percentage of the total effort. For example, pro-
gramming is typically 30% to 40% of the total effort of a project. But during that time, a
lead tester might be working on a test plan, while programmers might have to stop work
for half a day to review the requirements or design documents on another project. When
there are more than two or three projects being worked on simultaneously, things can get
very chaotic.

Usually, a programmer is fully allocated to a programming task. This means that the pro-
grammer is spending all of his time on that task (minus lunch, bathroom breaks, etc.) But
in other cases, a resource will be only partially allocated to a task. For example, a confer-
ence room may be a scarce resource; it might be reserved only in the morning, but free in
the afternoon. Or a designer might work on two projects at once, meeting with stakehold-
ers for one project in the morning while analyzing usability lab data for another in the
afternoon.

The project manager’s first goal is to make sure that the shared resources are not over-
allocated. If one project’s schedule has a resource allocated 50% for the entire week, while
another has that resource allocated 100% during the same week, that resource has a
150% allocation. Over-allocation problems often do not show up on the schedule.
What’s more, if the estimates do not include overhead (going to meetings, reading email,
helping customers, talking to senior managers, or other interruptions), then a person can
be over-allocated even if the schedule says that she isn’t. When taking effort into account
on a project schedule, it’s important to remember that even though people may be in the
office for eight hours each day, they might only be available for project work for five of
those hours. Also, the project manager must make sure that changes are controlled prop-
erly. If the scope of the project changes but the team is not given a chance to create new
estimates, team members will almost certainly end up over-allocated.

Under-allocation is also a danger. If an engineer does not have any scheduled tasks for a
week, she can easily get bored. That engineer may not be unhappy about the situation,
but if the rest of the team is crunched for time, their morale will be impacted when they
see their teammate take off early every day. One way to prevent this is to have low-prior-
ity projects where tasks can be assigned to under-allocated team members. However,
enough time must be given to allow each person to ramp up on the task and finish
enough to feel like the time was not wasted; otherwise, it just feels like busywork.
Modern project management software will often have a “resource pool” feature that
allows a project manager to set up a single set of resources available to multiple projects.
When a project schedule draws a resource from that pool, the allocation level for that
resource is increased accordingly in the pool, so that allocation shows up on all of the

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