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148 RESOURCE LEVELING, GAMES OF CHANCE

ect WBS is three levels (default is Department/Phase/Task). Also each project
can belong to a specified group of projects (accumulators) for further summa-
rized analysis.

Each individual resource can belong to a group or class of resources. Re-
source assignments can be made at the group or individual level. This supports a
real world environment, where we often wish to evaluate the impact of pending
and future work, without assigning that work to specific individuals. An espe-
cially helpful feature of Allegro is the ability to reassign work from a resource
class to individuals, either manually or automatically. In the automatic method,
Allegro considers the workloads for resources assigned to the project when it
makes these assignments. Allegro can do this because it maintains a record of re-
source availability.

The master calendar, in Allegro, can be set to define up to 54 custom, variable
periods. Normally, you would set up a few historical periods, followed by weekly
periods for a few months, and then go to coarser periods, such as months and
quarters. A period can be any number of days. Each period becomes a column in
the spreadsheet.

Data can be analyzed by project, resources, timeslice, and so on at any level of
detail. All analysis views are in the spreadsheet format, with a freeze column at
the right and a freeze row at the bottom (user selectable). Data can be viewed in
Hours, Revenue, Labor (costs), or Percentage of Available Time. All views can be
printed. In addition, there is a report writer for graphs and customized reports.

All of this goes just a bit beyond the typical capabilities of traditional project
management software. But Allegro users must forgo critical path scheduling, or
use a CPM program to generate the schedule. In Allegro, each work item (proj-
ect/dept/phase/task) is assigned a start and end date, which is used for assigning
resources. Resource assignment can be uniform, or can be discrete (by loading
each time period), or automatic (considering availability). Additional features in-
clude: user specified billing and costing attributes, an award probability (percent-
age) multiplier, project and contract accounting fields, and several project and
resource classification fields.

Time Keeping Software Traditional project management software assumes that
task progress will be entered into the system, as start and completion dates and
percent complete. It also assumes that actual resource usage will be entered di-
rectly into the resource assignment records, on a task-by-task basis. But this is not
normally the best way to enter resource time data.

Most traditional project management software tools now provide a timesheet
view, which facilitates the entering of time spent on tasks, as well as supporting
manager review and approval of such entries. These features will optimize and