A good way to calculate Earned Value with Cost Resources?

[tfz]

Hello,

Has anyone found a good way to calculate Earned Value using Cost Resources
in MS Project 2007? We have subcontractors doing some tasks, and would like
to include the cost from the subcontractors in our earned value calcuations.
Here is our delima:

-- When we enter the subcontractors as cost resources, the costs aren't
included in the Earned Value calculations. (BCWP or ACWP).

-- If we enter the subcontractors as material resources, the costs are
included in the earned value calculations, but it screws up the schedule.

--- If we set up a calculated field to take % Complete times the Actual
costs to try and approximate the earned value fields (while keeping the
subcontractors as Cost Resources), it kind of works, but it's not timephased
and you can't set the status date, so that makes it kind of a non-starter.

Has anyone found a good way to do this?

Many thanks for any ideas.

 

[Jan De Messemaeker]

AFAIK Material resources never screw up a schedule

--
Jan De Messemaeker
Microsoft Project Most Valuable Professional
+32 495 300 620
For availability check:
http://users.online.be/prom-ade/Calendar.pdf

 

[tfz]

Sorry, I misspoke. We enetered them as WORK resources, not MATERIAL
resources. That somewhat screwed up the schedule, because we gave them a rate
of $100/hr, and just entered hours for them to reach the desired dollar
amount.
(So, if we wanted to pay them $10,000 dollars, we'd enter 100 hours of work
for them, which has no real corrolation to the actual amount of hours we'd
expect the task to take).

That being said, maybe I should try entering them as material resources....
I haven't checked to see if that would cause them to be included in the
earned value calculations or not.

Thanks for giving me the idea.

 

[andrewandrew]

A few hacks I use:

--If there are no resource costs at all, you can put them in the Fixed Cost
field of summary tasks, which is an editable field. That will work nicely
with your auto-calculated %Complete on the summary task

--Forego timescaling and stick the costs on a milestone

--Make a hammock task that spans the dates you want the timescaling to
happen over, then put a fixed cost on it. The key here is that fixed costs
are timescaled AND run through earned value, so try to use that. It's a
bummer that the Cost Resource feature isn't run through EV, the idea being
that they're for air travel and stuff and so don't do anything useful, as
opposed to being for fixed-price contracts.

--Use your hack of a $1/hr resource and screwing around with the work until
the cost works out. The better way to do this is to set the task to Type:
Fixed Duration and Effort Driven:Yes, and then edit the Work field instead of
the Duration field. This will leave your schedule alone. You'l end up with
some wacky number of resources, which will ultimately look a lot like a Cost
Resource.

Andrew

 

[tfz]

Thank you, Andrew. Those sound helpful and I will try them out.