Microsoft Project for design tasks

[Wilson]

Project budget dictates how we work on our design tasks and a bottom-up
budget seems difficult to work with if we are trying to satisfy not just
quantitive goals.

As architects working on design tasks within fixed budget, we typically
resolve functional quantitive requirements (e.g. size, number of offices
space, the number of parking space...) first and use the left over budget to
improve on qualitive goals (e.g. dynamics of user circulation, building
proportions, contrasting color and light). The project schedule is therefore
following the project budget.

It is difficult to assign proper working hours for design tasks since we can
typically discover better solutions if time allows. We cannot allocate only
the minimum hours for quantitive requirements if we want to stay competitive.

Is Project right for our projects? We just bought Office Suite. What are
other programs that are good for both budgeting and scheduling?

Wilson Chang, AIA

oh! Happy New Year~

 

[Mike Glen]

Hi Wilson,

Welcome to this Microsoft Project newsgroup

I'll make a start for the New Year Your projects are no different to
millions of others faced with similar problems. They have been project
managed for centuries, but only recently - say the past 50 years - have they
been analysed using Project Management techniques like Network Analysis,
CPM, PERT and all the other varients. Microsoft Project has been developed
from the best known of these techniques and can thus be adapted to meet all
your individual projects. As, by definition, a project is a unique
undertaking that has a clearly defined start and finish, and requires the
management of men, materiel and money, every project is different. Your
projects will thus fit into whatever project management package you care to
use.

As for MS Project, provided you input tasks, durations, precedence logic and
then assign resources, Project will tell you what you can achieve with that
input. If the end date and/or cost is outside your requirements, you'll
have to do what every other project manager does: refine, assign more
resources, cut durations or change the specification (quality) until
Project's calculations give you an acceptable schedule. The go with it!

FAQs, companion products and other useful Project information can be seen at
this web address: http://project.mvps.org/faqs.htm

Hope this helps - please let us know how you get on

Have a healthy, prosperous and happy new year

Mike Glen
MS Project MVP
See http://tinyurl.com/2xbhc for Project Tutorials