sohara28 said:
Thanks for the reply, John. I did find the Resource View that you mention,
and I set the beginning date to 2/1/05, the end date to 4/10/05, and the unit
to "Entire Period". Tom and I then tried to report all of his past work by
putting "200" in the
first task listed. We got an error message that said "You have no tasks
scheduled for this period." I'm thinking that I may have had a later project
beginning date, so I'm checking that, but often the requirements are written
before the project plan is made, so how would we report the hours devoted to
that task?
At any rate, I will continue fooling with this. As an absolute newby, every
discovery is exciting, and every failure frustrating.
Shannon
sahara28,
Actually I suggested the Resource Usage View which is a built-in view
(View/More Views) not a built-in report (although there are Reports that
emulate the Usage view). So I guess I don't understand how you tried to,
". . . put 200 in the first task listed" because data cannot be entered
into a report - reports are output only.
The only plans that will succeed ARE those that have requirements
established and agreed upon by everyone involved before the plan to
fulfill those requirements is developed. It is not all that uncommon
(although certainly not desirable) to start working on something before
a formalized plan is developed. This often occurs with pre-contract
effort. In that case, the plan still needs to take into account the
tasks already completed and in particular the resources or funds already
spent. I call those "actuals to date" and there are various ways to
include them in a plan.
One approach is the following. Declare a point in time where formal
tracking of the plan started or will start (this might be an initial
contract date or a formal Initial Baseline Review). Everything before
that time is "actuals" (i.e. sunk cost) and everything after is the
estimated plan to finish the project. In some cases it might simply be
convenient to roll all project actuals into a single line in the plan
and in other cases it might be of benefit to break down various pieces
of the effort to date. The actuals could be entered into the Fixed Cost
field or they could be shown by entering task information to achieve the
desired real life scenario. For example, if Tom worked 200 hrs from
2/1/05 through 4/11/05 (note that 4/10/05 is a Sunday which is normally
non-working), make the following entries (assuming the Project Start
Date is 2/1/05):
1. Task Name (Also set the Task Type to Fixed Duration - Project/Task
Information/Advanced tab)
2. Duration: 49 days (That will allow Project to calculate the correct
Finish date given the Start date of 2/1/05. Note: the best way to
establish a task Finish date is to enter the Start date, if it is
something other than the Project Start Date, and then iterate the
Duration to get the desired Finish date. This assumes calculation is set
to automatic.)
3. Resource Names: Tom
4. Work: 200 hr
5. % Complete: 100%
The Cost will be computed based on Tom's pay rate (Resource Sheet) and
Tom will be shown at 51% utilization over that task duration.
Hope this helps.
John
Project MVP
