Dealing with Sharing Resources across Programs
SanDisk wants to be the first company to the market with new products to capture the market and provide long-term revenues. Therefore, it needs to develop new products as quickly as possible. SanDisk is sharing the same resources across multiple programs and must allocate resources carefully across these competing initiatives.
So, one of the first thing schedulers need to do is provide to executives a time-phased resource requirements spreadsheet. However, until the critical path has been validated, optimized, and stabilized, the resource requirements continue to be adjusted to find out how the program can be delivered in the fastest way.
This requires tedious adding of resources on the critical path and removal of resources from non-critical paths until the resourcing is perfectly balanced. The spreadsheet displays the number of resources needed in each skill and for how many months. A balanced spreadsheet shows peaks that aren't too steep and a lack of deep valleys because it is important that the work is consecutive as much as possible.
This balancing of resource workloads is best done with generic resources assigned to the tasks rather than named resources. It takes too much effort to add Tom, Dick, and Harry to many tasks compared to raising the number of system analysts by three.
This process is tedious but provides SanDisk with huge savings on their programs that deliver their new products to sell.
| 
Hunting for the Critical Path in an IMS
