By associating costs with each of your resources, you can also come up with a budget for the project. When you're done, you have a detailed project plan. The proper allocation of resources is crucial to the success of a project. Project management programs provide several tools for maximizing efficiency. All the programs flag potential problems in regular views, such as Gantt charts, and automatically link data from the views to more detailed resource allocation graphs.
Results vary depending on the quality of the resource-leveling algorithm used by the program.
Professional project managers look for more complex features. A job such as laying a concrete sidewalk might require 6 hours of work but have an actual duration of 3 days because of the time it takes for concrete to cure. Some programs give you tools to profile the uneven distribution of effort over the duration of the task, a process known as resource contouring. Many of the vendors also bundle or integrate third-party report writers, such as Seagate Software's Crystal Reports, with their programs. More recently, project management programs have gained the ability to generate HTML-based reports.