Tracking Cost of Contract Labour on a project, for 3/4 mth contrac

[Angel]

Hello,

I am trying to track Project Costs for a client 'after the fact' so to
speak. The project has ended, and the client wishes to determine what their
actual Costs for their Staff were. Over the course of the project which
lasted from 2006 to 2008, the client hired some specialists for specific
periods of time to work on various tasks.

So there are specific dates where these Staff members would be present as
Resources, and others where they would not.

Sometimes this happens in the middle of a Task, and some of these tasks can
be lengthy.

i.e. if Mark is assigned to the Task Develop Space Standards, and this task
takes 5 months from 1st January to 1st of June. Mark comes into the Project
on the 1st of February, and leaves on the 1st of May.

I want to track Mark's Cost on the project for that particular phase for the
1st of February to the 1st of May.

On the 1st of May Jane entered the project, at a different Salary Rate. So I
would need to track her from the 1st of May to the end of the project.

I know that there is Working Time, and Non Working time in the Resource
Calendars. But I'm not sure that's the right way to go about it.

I can Assign both Mark and Jane as Resources for that task, and then add
massive blocks of Exceptions between specific Dates.

For Mark that would be from the start of the project 1st January to when his
contract started on the 1st of February . Then another massive exception from
the 1st of May when his contract ended to 1st of Jan 2023 (past the end of
the project)?

I thought there must be an elegant way to setup Temporary Resources for
Staff, or to represent people on fixed length contracts, say three months or
four months.

How would I do this quickly and easily? Is setting these massive Exception
Periods really the best way to represent these 'Temporary' resources?

 

[Andrew Lavinsky]

Create a task. Assign both Mark and Jane to the task.

Go to the Task Usage View. Add Actual Work to the right by right-clicking
and picking it from the available options. Zoom out so that each cell represents
a single month. Plug in the Actual Work for each resource for the appropriate
month. Afterwards, go to the table on the left, and make sure that Remaining
Work = 0 for each of the assignments.

You might be better off doing all of this in Excel however. MS Project isn't
really intended to be an acounting program.


- Andrew Lavinsky
Blog: http://blogs.catapultsystems.com/epm

 

[Angel]

I've determined that if I create a single Task lasting for 3 months, and a
resource that is only working for 1 month is assigned, Project tracks the
Cost of that resource as though it worked for 3 months.

What I thought would happen is if I assign Three Resources to the project,
and One of them, Mark, is available for 1 month that the Cost for Mark for
that Task would be just 1 month.

Instead, Project is showing me a Cost for the Resource Mark as though Mark
would work for a full 3 Months.

I have Mark's Availability set from the 1st of the month to the end of the
month...so why is it calculating Cost for a full 3 months for the entire task?

 

[Andrew Lavinsky]

Looks like I answered the wrong question with my previous post.

I think you're getting the issues of resource calendars and max units mixed
up. The availability merely sets the maximum at which the resource *should*
be assigned to a specific task. For instance, if I set my availability to
..5 for a specific period, project managers can still assign me on a full
time basis, but I will show up as overallocated in the Resource Sheet. If
the PM runs the leveling engine, it will level the project for my maximum
availability.

Changing availability will not affect how the task is scheduled. It will
only change the trigger at which the resource appears overallocated.

Now if you went into my calendar and set that time to nonworking days - then
if you assigned me to a task, it would take on my calendar, and shift out.

In your case, where you're developing a model of what happened already in
the past, all of these calculations are really unnecessary as you know the
Actuals and can just plug them in to get the results you need.


- Andrew Lavinsky
Blog: http://blogs.catapultsystems.com/epm