Resource Loading: Under, Optimal or Over-Allocated Teams?
Understand the consequences of under, optimal and over-allocation of project team resources and how resource loading decisions affect delivery performance and team wellbeing.
Resource allocation is where project planning meets organisational reality. The theoretically optimal resource plan rarely survives contact with competing priorities, unexpected turnover and scope changes. Understanding how different loading profiles affect delivery — and your people — is essential for any project manager.
The Options
Under-Allocation
Staffing the project below what the workload requires. This might be an intentional conservative approach to avoid over-commitment, or an unavoidable consequence of resource constraints. Under-allocated teams can focus and deliver quality work on their assigned tasks, but overall project throughput suffers and timelines extend. The pace of delivery simply cannot match the demand.
Optimal Allocation
Staffing the project at or near the level required by the plan, with appropriate contingency for absence and uncertainty. Team members have full but manageable workloads, allowing time for quality work, knowledge sharing, risk management and reasonable recovery from unexpected issues. This is the ideal state — challenging to achieve in practice but worth planning for explicitly.
Over-Allocation
Assigning more work than the team can realistically deliver. This is endemic in project organisations where resource plans are built on optimistic assumptions, or where team members are simultaneously allocated across multiple projects. Over-allocation creates the illusion of progress in the short term — tasks appear to be in hand — but quality declines, individuals become stressed and burned out, and the project ultimately delivers late as the reality of the workload becomes unavoidable.
Why It Matters in Practice
The research on multitasking and context switching in knowledge work is unambiguous: frequent task switching costs up to 40% of productive time. Project team members working across three or more simultaneous projects are significantly less productive per hour than those with focused assignments. Yet over-allocation remains common because the short-term pressure to show resources "in use" outweighs the long-term case for focus.
Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM) explicitly addresses resource contention by identifying the resource-constrained critical path and protecting it from multitasking.
In the Simulation
In MyEdMentor, your resource loading choice affects delivery velocity, error rate and team morale scores. Over-allocated teams show initially high apparent throughput but accumulate quality defects and morale penalties that depress performance in later turns. Optimally loaded teams deliver more consistently and are better placed to absorb the additional demands that arise from risk events.