Personal blog on early retirement, a little traveling, and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
A resource loading chart is the histogram that sits under a Gantt chart: for each day of the plan, how many people that day needs. It is the least glamorous drawing in project management and the only one that ever told me anything I did not already know from looking at the bars.
Here is one for a 21-task house renovation, before and after the schedule was made to fit inside the crew that actually exists. The two panels hold exactly the same amount of work.
A broker emailed me a rate sheet once and I nearly moved a card over it. Their number was $275 a spot. The broker I was already with paid $250 for the same card. Twenty-five dollars is twenty-five dollars, so I started filling out the paperwork before I bothered to read the rest of the page — and then I saw the cycle length. That is the thing nobody puts in bold: tradeline payouts are quoted per authorized user spot, but the spot doesn’t last the same length of time at every broker. Once I divided by the months, the $275 offer was worth barely half of what I was already getting.
So this post is about the arithmetic I wish someone had handed me at the start. Not which broker is nicest to deal with — what a card actually earns, per month, and which of the things you can change about your card are worth money.
Continue reading “Tradeline Payouts: Why Per Spot Is the Wrong Number”
The question I get more than any other is some version of “which tradelines should I buy” — usually from someone staring at a broker’s list with forty cards on it, sorted by price, with no idea what separates the $500 one from the $1,400 one. The honest answer is that most of what you’re looking at is priced on one variable, and it isn’t the one people fixate on. Buyers walk in wanting the biggest credit limit they can afford. The listings are priced mostly on age.
I pull live pricing from three brokers every hour, so rather than tell you what I think, I’ll show you what the market is actually charging today and where the same card costs meaningfully different money depending on who’s selling it.
Continue reading “Which Tradelines Should I Buy? Age Beats Limit”
Resource leveling vs resource smoothing is usually taught as a pair of definitions to memorise for an exam: leveling may push the finish date out, smoothing may not. Both true, both useless the moment you are standing in front of a schedule that needs fixing, because neither tells you which one your plan can actually give you.
They are not two techniques. They are one trade-off, read from opposite ends. I solved the same 21-task renovation both ways and the two answers landed on exactly the same curve.
Continue reading “Resource Leveling vs Resource Smoothing, Measured”
Every project management course teaches fast tracking vs crashing in the same order and with the same moral: if the date is at risk, fast track first, because overlapping tasks costs nothing but risk, and crash second, because crashing costs money. I have repeated that advice myself. Then I put both through a solver on the same plan and got the opposite of what the order implies.
Fast tracking pulled eight working days off the schedule and one day off the job. Crashing pulled six off the schedule and eleven off the job. Same 21-task renovation, same solver, same afternoon.
