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Read and rebalance the swimlanes
Read the resource swimlanes on the schedule, their capacity lines, utilisation, and red overflow, then rebalance work so the programme stays deliverable.
What you'll achieve
Staff the schedule so every person and pool stays inside real capacity, catching and clearing over-utilisation before it becomes a missed deadline.
You'll end up with: A schedule where every swimlane sits at or under its capacity line, with over-utilisation caught and rebalanced before it becomes a real problem.
Before you start
Booking people is easy. Not overbooking them is the actual job
Dragging an allocation onto someone's row takes a second. Doing it forty times across a programme without quietly stacking two jobs onto the same person in the same week, that's the part that actually decides whether a schedule is a real plan or just an optimistic drawing. The resource swimlanes exist for exactly that check: every person and pool gets a lane that shows what's been booked against what they genuinely have.
We'll work on Riverside Apartments, where Sarah Chen is carrying Concept Design and has just been booked onto the Client Workshops too. The two collide in the same week, her lane goes red, and we'll find it and clear it.
What the lane is actually measuring
A swimlane is doing one calculation, and it helps to see it explicitly. Available hours start from a person's work pattern, the hours they're rostered on a normal week, minus public holidays and firm closures. That result draws the capacity line across their lane, and it isn't a flat number, it dips whenever a holiday or closure lands. Leave works differently: an approved, or even still-pending, leave request doesn't move the capacity line, it shows up as its own blocked-out band on the lane instead. Allocated hours add up every band dragged onto that lane, leave included, stacking up for those days. Divide one by the other and you get utilisation: at or under 100 percent the lane is healthy, past it, the lane turns red because more is booked, leave counted in, than the person actually has.
A utilisation percentage on the staff list is a useful glance, but the swimlane is where you actually resource, because it shows capacity week by week across the whole timeline. That's what tells you not just that someone's overbooked, but exactly which week to fix.
Read a lane from three angles
- 1
Open the resource swimlanes so each person and pool gets its own lane.
- 2
Choose By Track to see what kind of work is filling a lane.
- 3
Choose By Project to see which job is claiming those hours.
- 4
Choose By Resource to sum everything one person carries across every loaded project.
Sarah can look perfectly fine on Riverside Apartments alone and still be overbooked, because a different project is quietly eating the rest of her week. By Resource sums whatever the schedule currently has loaded, but a Project filter narrows that load down to one project's work, resource lanes included, so a filtered view still can't show her real total. Clear the Project filter first, then group By Resource to see the truth about her total load.
A pool lane, say Architect, starts with the sum of every member's available hours, then accounts for hours already committed to individual members and other lanes for the same pool. Book the pool hard in one week and the whole lane can tip red even though no single person looks maxed out individually, because the shared total is what's actually being spent.
Spot the red, then clear it
Over-utilisation is rarely a single bad decision. It's usually two entirely reasonable bookings landing on the same person in the same week.
- 1
On Sarah Chen's lane, one week shades red where Concept Design and the Client Workshops overlap.
- 2
Open the colliding band. The editor states it plainly: Over-allocated in this period.
- 3
Double-click the overlapping week so the change applies to that week alone, not the whole booking.
- 4
Choose Priya Sharma in Assigned to and confirm she reaches twelve and a half hours a day.
- 5
Change Type to Fixed Total and set Total Hours to thirty-four so Priya reaches eight and a half hours a day and the warning lifts.
- 6
Click Save to keep Priya's balanced week while Sarah keeps the surrounding work.
Reassigning a single week isn't the only fix, spreading the same work across more weeks or a lighter stretch clears the red just as well. Either way, the goal is the same: get every affected week back under its capacity line without disturbing work that was never the problem.
Leave doesn't shrink the capacity line the way a holiday does, it shows up as its own blocked-out band and counts as booked time for that week. An allocation that was perfectly fine last week can tip red the moment someone requests time off, even before it's approved. If a lane suddenly goes red with nothing new allocated on it, look for a leave band first, and read it as real context rather than a scheduling mistake.
Troubleshooting
- A lane is red but no single band looks large. The lane totals everything booked that week, several small allocations plus leave can add up just as easily as one big one.
- A pool lane is red while every member individually looks fine. Pool capacity is shared, so combined demand can tip the pool over before any one person does.
- You cleared the red on this project, but the person's still shown as overbooked elsewhere. A Project filter narrows the whole schedule to that project's work, resource lanes included, so it hides rather than greys out everything else they're on. Clear the Project filter, then group By Resource to see their true total.
Where this fits next
You can now staff a programme without quietly over-committing anyone. To keep the capacity lines themselves accurate, get the underlying inputs right: set up your team and their work patterns, and record leave and holidays so holidays dip the capacity line and leave shows up as the blocked-out context it is.