Overdrive Scheduling

Overdrive scheduling is a useful feature for modeling external resources or wait times.  The overdrive option on the member availability setting tells the scheduling engine to turn off load balancing for that resource.  The effect is that all tasks assigned to an overdrive resource start on the current date unless the task is pushed out by delays or dependencies.  The availability is only respected in terms of days of week and hours per day. 

You turn on overdrive in the member profile:

Overdrive can be useful when you don't want the workload of an outside resource to push out your schedule.  Let's look at a schedule with a virtual member called Contractor.  In this first screenshot, overdrive is not turned on for the Contractor, so his work flows out as you'd expect.  He needs to finish his higher priority task before the next one starts: 

Now let's take a look at that same schedule with overdrive turned on for the Contractor.  Notice that he is now scheduled to start every one of his tasks on the current day.  Look closely at the time scale and you'll see that the project now gets done sooner: 

In the simple example above, it's a very small time difference for the project finish date; but you can imagine that in a real project where the Contractor owns a lot of work, the effect could be significant.  Keep that in mind to be sure that you aren't setting yourself up for an overly optimistic finish date.

Another helpful way to use overdrive is to model wait times, like so:

What we're showing above is that Mary has four tasks that need to get done, but in between each one she needs to wait five days for the Contractor to do his thing.  It's nice to see those wait times as tasks for visibility, and it also give you a place to attach notes and documents if necessary.  You could even set a promise date on a wait task.

In the example above, the wait task is assigned to a virtual overdrive member named Contractor.   This ensures that the effort on the wait task isn't associated to a real workspace member.  Since "Contractor" is set to overdrive, you can use that same virtual member for all wait times in your schedule without worrying about the resource leveling effect.     

Things to be aware of:

• Somebody will have to reduce the estimate or log time on the wait tasks as the wait period progresses, otherwise it will push along with each passing day.
• The effort on the wait task will roll up to containers and throw off totals and analysis trends; deleting the wait tasks as they complete will correct that.