One person multiple tasks (newbie)

[Mike Gilbert]

Hi,

This question relates to Project Pro 2007/Project Server 2007/PWA.

I have a working mom who works a total of 30 hours/week, with different
hours each day. I've set up a resource calendar for her; so far so good.

Her primary job is billable work for a customer; the current contract totals
a fixed number of hours (say 3000), so when those hours have been expended
the job is done. If it helps I know about how many months the work should
take, but it's really more of an effort driven job.

Now for the wrinkle. For every day that she puts any time into this project
at all, there's 1 hour of non-billable overhead time.

So what I would like levelling to do is:
- Allocate the first hour each day to the non-billable task
- Allocate the remainder each day to the billable task

I can almost pre-plan this in a spreadsheet and import it, but I'd like the
future plan (the end date) to adjust automatically if she takes vacation
time, works a weekend, or whatever.

I can almost do this with allocating a percent of her time to each task, but
that doesn't work because her schedule varies daily. For example if I
allocate 25% of her time that would come out to 1 hour on days she works 4
hours, but it would incorrectly allocate 2 hours on days she works 8 hours.

I thought task priority (schedule the non billable at 5 hours/week as a high
priority recurring task) might do it. That's close, but it puts all 5 hours
on Monday each week instead of spreading them out at one hour each day.

I plan to have her use PWA timesheets to record her time, so we can both see
how close she is to the 3000 hours. It would be nice if the PWA plan
suggested a "normal" week, so she could just move plan to actual unless she
had some sick time or something.

How can I make Project understand these scheduling requirements so levelling
will do the right thing?

Ideally somebody will tell me a way to make Project do exactly what I want.
If I can't get Project to handle this perfectly, what would you do as a
"close enough" practical solution to track this sort of contract in Project?

Thanks,
Mike

 

[Jan De Messemaeker]

Hi,

Some ideas

- Define the non billable as a recurring task, 1 hour/day.
- By all means, if a day by day scheduling is what you need, why level week
by week? Level Hour by Hour or even minute by minute
- Alternative: make a base calendar 8-9 am call it nonbill and another one
9am-5pm (or whatever) call it Billable; for the nonbillable also use a
bucket of hours but link that task to nonbill as a task calendar and link
the billable calendar to the other task. No need fore leveling.

Hope this helps,

 

[Mike Glen]

Hi Mike,

Try posting on the server newsgroup. Please see FAQ Item: 24. Project
Newsgroups. FAQs, companion products and other useful Project information
can be seen at this web address: http://project.mvps.org/faqs.htm

Mike Glen
Project MVP

 

[Steve House]

A note of caution. The resource assignment percentage does not mean the
percentage of her workday that she is working except as a first
approximation. What it really indicates is the relationship between the
time spent on a task and the work output of the task. A 1 day task with the
resource assigned 25% does not mean she will spend 2 hours on the task.
Instead, it means she will spend 8 hours working on the task and get
accomplished what she COULD have done in 2 hours if she was working at her
full capacity. It is very important to remember that the assignment of 25%
does not mean she's working for 2 hour, it means she's working for 8 hours
to do what could have been done in 2. Since you're billing hours and not
output, that makes a huge difference.

I should add that this sort of task is exceedingly rare in a project and
scheduling software needs some interpretation to handle it properly. In a
project schedule a 'task' without exception that I can think of always
produces a quantifiable deliverable - when the deliverable isn't complete
the task isn't complete and when the deliverable is done the task is done.
The duration is whatever the time is that is required to produce the
deliverable, period. So in PM terms, to say the task is complete when 3000
hours of work has been done is a very problematic issue - the goal of the
task isn't to burn up 3000 hours, the goal of the task is to make 1000
widgets, no more and no less, and it normally takes 3 hours to make a
widget. The task will be done when precisely 1000 widgets are made,
regardless of whether it actually turns out to be 3000 hours or in fact
takes 2000 hours or 4000 hours. If we've done 1000 widgets in 2000 hours,
the extra thousand hours is money down the drain, but if it takes us more
than 3 hours per widget, we can't just stop at 3000 hours but must continue
on until the entire quantity of 1000 widgets has been made regardless of how
long it takes. (How or whether we bill the customer for the extra time is
another issue but Project isn't accounting software and couldn't care less
about payment cycles, billings, billing dates, or revenues.)

 

[Mike Gilbert]

Thanks everybody for your prompt feedback.

The suggestion about a daily recurring task sounds good, except that it's a
pain when my employee fills out the PWA timesheet. She'll see a huge list of
copies of the daily task (one for each work day), and she'll have to pick the
correct one for that day to enter her time into. But maybe this is the best
I can do.

The bill/nonbill calendars suggestion is interesting. I don't understand it
completely but I'll experiment and see what I can accomplish. Sometimes a
pointer to the right strategy is all you need.

Mike

 

[Jan De Messemaeker]

OK.
"Make a base calendar" : Tools, Change Working Time, New
"Use it as a task calendar" for a task: Task Information, Advanced, Calendar
window.
Hope this helps

 

[Mike Gilbert]

The nonbillable calendar works!
Thanks again.

OK.
"Make a base calendar" : Tools, Change Working Time, New
"Use it as a task calendar" for a task: Task Information, Advanced, Calendar
window.
Hope this helps

 

[Jan De Messemaeker]

You're welcome, Mike