Resource Scheduling

Abstract

It might seem that the schedule of starting and finishing dates for all the project activities produced at the end of the initial network analysis (Section 2.6) provides the schedule according to which the project should be run. This is far from true: no account was taken, during the forward and backward pass calculations, of the possibility that activities might compete for scarce resources. For example, the activities of the direct labour force, as originally scheduled (Table 2.3) require road making, fencing, and the installation of part of the water supply to go on simultaneously. Now, these activities will certainly all require some of the same resources, such as site transport or unskilled labour. It may be that there are not enough of these resources available to enable all these activities to go on simultaneously. If this is the case, some adjustments will have to be made to the provisional timetable.