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Resource leveling

Resource leveling resolves overallocation by pushing lower-priority work later until no one is assigned more hours in a day than their capacity allows. Run it when the Gantt looks great on paper but people have too much work in the same week.

Leveling is a whole-lens operation that delays tasks in the lens only — it does not rewrite Jira dates until you decide to apply the delays.

Before you run leveling

Section titled “Before you run leveling”

Leveling needs three things to produce useful results:

  1. Assignees on every relevant task. Unassigned tasks can’t be leveled against anyone’s capacity.
  2. Estimates on every relevant task — Foundation uses time estimates to compute daily workload.
  3. A capacity value per person, expressed as hours per day. The default is a standard full-time schedule; override it for part-time contributors or teams.

Also make sure tasks have both a start and due date. Dateless tasks are invisible to the algorithm.

Open the leveling panel

Section titled “Open the leveling panel”
  1. Open the Gantt for your lens.
  2. In the Gantt toolbar or Inspector, open the Resource Leveling panel.
  3. Review the current workload view — each assignee’s daily hours are plotted, with overallocation days called out.

Run the algorithm

Section titled “Run the algorithm”
  1. Click Level Resources.
  2. The panel shows a Leveling… state while the algorithm runs. Large lenses can take several seconds to a minute.
  3. When it finishes, a summary appears: N tasks delayed, M overallocations resolved.
  4. Review each proposed delay — Foundation shows the reason (which assignee’s capacity was breached on which date) and the new start and end dates for each moved task.

How the algorithm decides what to delay

Section titled “How the algorithm decides what to delay”

At each iteration, Foundation:

  1. Recomputes daily workload per assignee.
  2. Finds the earliest day where someone is still overallocated.
  3. Picks the lowest-priority movable task contributing to that day’s overload.
  4. Delays that task by the smallest amount that restores capacity.
  5. Repeats until no overallocations remain or the iteration cap is hit.

Tasks that are already in progress or completed, or that are locked by manual dates, are excluded unless you opt them in.

Keep or reset the delays

Section titled “Keep or reset the delays”
  • Leveling delays are stored on the lens. The bars shift visually; Jira data is not touched.
  • Click Reset in the panel to clear all leveling delays and restore the original dates.
  • If you edit a task’s schedule or its dependencies after leveling, Foundation removes the leveling delay from just that task — your manual edit wins.

Limitations

Section titled “Limitations”
  • Leveling works within the lens. It does not coordinate across different lenses.
  • Sprint-scheduled tasks (dates derived from a Jira sprint) are not moved by leveling.
  • Groups and milestones are not moved; only leaf tasks.
  • Overallocations that can’t be resolved within the iteration budget are reported as remaining — you’ll need to adjust capacity, dependencies, or scope.
Section titled “Related”