Merlin Project: Redistribute Remaining Work

You plan your projects with Merlin Project, have completed the planning phase, assigned work to your resources and record actual progress as it occurs?

Throughout the project's lifecycle, activities might be on time, slightly behind schedule, ahead of schedule, or scheduled for the future. Often, there is enough time to recover from minor delays, but sometimes an activity on the critical path falls behind, causing delays for other successor tasks or even the entire project.

In this post, we’ll show you how Merlin Project can help you prevent potential delays in your project.

An Activity on Critical Path Is Behind Schedule

The following activity was planned and assigned to the resource "Analyst". The Analyst reported their progress on the activity as 30%, which puts the activity behind schedule. When viewing the project in the Work Breakdown > Progress configuration, Merlin Project indicates the issue by color-coding the bar in red.

The resource further reported that they might not complete the activity within the planned duration. This is an issue that a Project Manager should address.

Redistribute Remaining Work

Hopefully, there is another resource on the team who can assist with the remaining 3.5 days of work.

Here’s what you do:

• Select the row of the activity.
• Assign the additional resource to the activity.
• When prompted by Merlin Project, decide how you want the actual values to be updated - after adding the new assignment.

• select 'Redistribute the remaining work only'
• and click onto 'OK'

The activity will be updated to show both the original assignment (Analyst) and the additional assignment (Analyst Assistant).

The remaining work for the activity was split between the assignments, so each one now needs to complete only 1.75 days of work

• Schedule the additional assignment so that it is on time.

NOTE: Even though this activity is currently behind schedule, if the two resources are able to complete it on time, the successors will be able to start as scheduled.

Conclusion

Not every delayed activity requires action to maintain the project timeline. However, delays on activities that are on the critical path can be addressed by assigning additional resources and using the "Redistribute the Remaining Work Only" feature of Merlin Project.

If you have any questions about this blog article or would like to discuss it, we look forward to your contribution in our forum.