How much can you over allocate a resource in resource plan?

I was giving Resource plan feature demo to a customer and out of curiosity, customer asked if I can assign 1,000 days of work to a resource on a single day. It turned out we couldn’t. When you press Save after assigning 1,000 days of work the system gave the following error.

 

“Your updates were not saved because of the following reasons: General error: Work value used is invalid. (Use this error information along with other errors to find out the cause of the problem.)”

 

The behaviour was same for generic resources. And this raised the inevitable question from customer. “How much can I over allocate a resource on a given day in the resource plan?”

 

I didn’t know the answer to this, but I promised to get back to customer and following information (mostly learnt by trial & error) is the result of that promise.

 

1) A resource can be allocated maximum 100 times of its Max. Units in a resource plan. So a resource with Max. Units of 100% (this is default) i.e. one full time person, can be assigned 100 days of work on a single day in resource plan.

 

2) If you increase Max. Units, the maximum possible work on a single day will also increase in same ratio. (E.g. setting current Max. Units of a resource to 1000% means you can allocate 1000 days of work to that resource)

 

3) Maximum Units allocated to a resource can be between 0 and 100,000,000

 

I also tested the maximum work that could be assigned to a resource on a single day in a Project Schedule. But I’ll leave the answer to the day when a customer asks me about it.

 

The usefulness of this knowledge? Hmmm… remember, curiosity can kill a cat!