Planning and tracking project

[jb]

Hi,

I have some "beginners" questions on planning and tracking, which I
would appreciate some advice on. My project has roughly a dozen team
members and takes nine months to complete.

Following Mike's excellent tutorials, I have entered my tasks and did
the dependency logic. I assigned the resources (sticking to the rule of
one resource per task), used leveling and noticed that the project
takes unexpectedly long.

So I thought, well some of the resources have very similar skills, why
not pool them? And instead of assigning DeveloperA to one task and
DeveloperB to another, I replaced every reference with "Developer" and
increased the availability of "Developer" to 200%. I did that with only
non-key resources.

Leveling yielded a better result. Good. Assuming that the team has the
flexibility, would I run into any surprises using this technique to
determine the end date? Is this a common technique or is my reasoning
flawed?

Now that I have two Developers with similar skills how can I track the
costs if the two have different rates (A is higher than B)? Remember
that I can no longer see in the plan if A or B is working on a task.

The last question also relates to tracking: assume that during the
course of the project I have to change the resource assignment of some
task. C is now supporting D on a task. Do I simply add C to a task
(with the above quoted rule: one resource per task, I would probably
add a task for C in that work stream)? Would project get confused in
terms of tracking (progress, time, duration, EV, etc.) compared to the
baseline?

Thanks in advance,
Stefan

 

[Mike Glen]

Hi JB,

Welcome to this Microsoft Project newsgroup

Thanks for your comment on my articles

You're doing fine so far and your proposals shouldn't give you any problems.

As to the resource rates, you'll have to compromise with a figure. Remember
that the rate is not the salary or wages, but the cost to the project of
using that resource, including training, sick pay, overheads, etc. Thus,
pick a reasonable figure that will fit the two Developers and accept that it
won't be 100% accurate - but then nothing is in project planning!

Now you have the basics under your belt, you can try adding a second
resource to a critical task - see #10 . Then to shorten the project, have
another look at #28.

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

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

 

[Steve House]

When you group your 2 developers into a single Developer resource with an
availability of 200%, they must be completely interchangeable parts,
identical in every respect including cost rate. If there is anything
signifigant to the project where they differ from one another, you need to
enter and assign them as individuals rather than merging them into what I
call an 'aggregate resource' (I like that term better because Project
already has an attribute called Resource Group which is something completely
different). Now the question comes up with regard to your rates, does it
really matter? Project is an estimating tool, not an 'exacting' tool <grin>
and it's not intended for detailed to-the-penny cost accounting. In fact,
common practice is to use a loaded resource cost that is a rate established
for budget planning purposes that includes mean salary and benefits,
pro-rata overheads such as cost of office space, equipment, and utilities,
hiring and on-going training costs, etc. You may have an engineering
department with 10 employees ranging in salary from a 50k new hire to a 100k
senior engineer but for staff planning purposes you use $80k as a standard
cost for all of them. You'd use the same number for project budget planning
purposes. The actuals at the end of the project will be something
different, of course, but you'll be in the ballpark, close enough for
government work as they say, and tracking the exact numbers is the
accounting department's problem, not the PMO's.

There is a workaround, sort of, because there are 5 cost rate tables
associated with each resource. With only 2 developers you could use table A
for the first one and table B for the second, then on a task by task basis
tell it which rate table applies. There are several problems - the biggest
being that you can only have 5 different rates - if you need 6, you're outa
luck. Second, it gets you back to having to know WHICH developer is doing
each task, the same issue you were trying to get away from by grouping them
in the first place.

 

[jb]

Thanks Mike and Glen for the quick response.

I think you're both right that measuring a project with 95% is more
than sufficient. Reality will make changes anyway. Thus going with an
average cost rate of the "aggregated resource" will do just fine. I
just have to accept that I must then track costs in Excel (as I used
to).

However, still somewhat unclear to me is to what extent one should
fiddle with the plan after the start. This relates to my last question
of

I think that

http://www.projectserverexperts.com/Shared Documents/ReassignTasks.htm

may be of help, but I'm not sure.

Thanks,
Stefan.

 

[Mike Glen]

You're welcome, jb

As to your question, the baseline is just that - a snapshot of the data as
it was when you decided to start the project. Any changes thereafter will
not change the baseline, and thus will have an effect on EV, etc. That is
why Project allows you to have 9 more interim baselines to allow for such
changes, should you wish to use them.

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