Resource Assignment & Over-Allocation Detector: Catch Double-Booked People Before You Commit

The problem this kills

You assign Priya to the new client build for 25 hours a week. It looks fine — until you remember she's already on two other projects, and a maintenance retainer, and she's part-time. Nobody adds it up. The double-booking surfaces three weeks later when two project leads both expect her full attention in the same window, deadlines slip, and someone burns out covering the gap.

The math that would have caught this is simple: does this person's total commitment, across every project they're on, exceed the hours they actually have in that window? But that math lives nowhere. It's scattered across a master staffing sheet, three project plans, and the resource manager's memory. By the time the over-allocation is visible, it's already a problem you're managing instead of one you prevented.

Spreadsheets make this worse, not better. The capacity column drifts. Part-time and split allocations get fudged. Two people edit the same tab and overwrite each other. There's no warning the moment you go over — you only find out when the person tells you they can't possibly do it all.

This tool moves the check to the moment of decision: the instant you propose an assignment, it sums the person's commitment across all projects and tells you, right then, if you've just over-allocated or double-booked them.

What you'll build

A simple internal web app for your staffing team. You import your people (with their available hours per week, full- or part-time) and your existing allocations (who's on what project, for how many hours, over which window). Then you enter a new assignment — person, project, hours, start and end date.

Before it's committed, the tool checks the new assignment against everything that person is already committed to. It sums their total commitment in that window, compares it to their available capacity, and flags an over-allocation or a same-window double-booking the instant it happens — and it shows you the conflicting projects by name, so you can see exactly what's competing for the person's time. Part-time hours and split allocations are handled correctly, not rounded away.

An over-allocation can't just sail through. A manager reviews and explicitly approves it — recording a reason ("client agreed to push phase 2") or a fix ("drop her retainer hours to 5") — before the assignment is committed. Once committed, you export a clean CSV in the exact columns your scheduling or PSA system expects.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The downloadable plan is a step-by-step file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your business — how you staff today, what a "week" of capacity means to you, how your people and allocation data are actually shaped and named, how you handle part-timers and split allocations, what counts as over capacity, who has to approve an overage, and the messy exceptions (PTO, ramp-up, soft holds, overlapping windows). It reflects a short tailored spec back to you and gets your thumbs-up before it builds anything, so the tool matches how your team really allocates people — not a generic template.

From there it walks the agent through the data model, the people-and-allocations import, the commitment-and-conflict engine, the conflict display that names the competing projects, the manager approval gate for overages, the commit step, and the clean CSV export. Every step ends with a ready-to-copy prompt. There's a full "No API yet?" path that uses Google Sheet / CSV imports as the data source and produces a clean CSV export — so you can build and run the whole thing this weekend regardless of what scheduling or PSA tool you're on.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This tool decides who works on what, so the controls aren't optional. The plan builds in login so only your team can use it, row-level security so you only ever see your own organization's people and projects, a complete audit trail of who proposed, approved, or fixed each assignment and when, a hard human-approval gate so no over-allocation is committed until a manager reviews it and records a reason or a fix, and duplicate guards so the same person-project-window assignment can't be entered or exported twice.

Who it's for

Resource managers, project managers, and staffing coordinators — anyone who allocates a shared pool of people across competing projects and is tired of discovering double-bookings after the damage is done. If you can tell me how many hours your people have and how you currently track who's on what, you can build this.

You've got this — start with the plan, paste the first prompt, and answer the interview. You'll be catching over-allocations before they happen by the end of the weekend.