productivity

[ellebelle]

I do not understand how to track productivity in project.
i want two people to work for my company. i pay them the same daily rate
regardless of whether they produce the same amount of units per day.
before the project starts, ideally i would like to put in a units per day
assumtion for each task and see how many units they produce over a given
period of time and how many units they should have produced by any given date.
i would also like to use a similar function to the work contour to backload
their productivity - ie by assuming they get faster as time goes on.
however none of this should effect how much i have to pay them. they get
paid a flat daily rate that does not change over time.

any help very much appreciated.

 

[davegb]

I do not understand how to track productivity in project.
i want two people to work for my company. i pay them the same daily rate
regardless of whether they produce the same amount of units per day.
before the project starts, ideally i would like to put in a units per day
assumtion for each task and see how many units they produce over a given
period of time and how many units they should have produced by any given date.
i would also like to use a similar function to the work contour to backload
their productivity - ie by assuming they get faster as time goes on.
however none of this should effect how much i have to pay them. they get
paid a flat daily rate that does not change over time.

any help very much appreciated.

This would be a stretch in Project. It's mainly intended for Project
scheduling, as the name implies. You're doing production scheduling, a
very different thing. There are production software packages out there,
they're just a little harder to find.

On the other hand, you might get Project to do this using custom fields
and maybe some VBA code. If you already know VBA, it probably wouldn't
be too difficult.

Another consideration is whether or not you want to just measure
productivity the way you've described it, or if you'd find "effective
productivity" more useful. I certainly don't find straight productivity
terribly useful in most circumstances, but yours may be different.

Hope this helps in your world.

 

[ellebelle]

thanks for you reply. i am pretty surprised that this functionality is
exceptional though.
what i really want can be illustrated best on the task usage page.

person 1 gets paid $100/day and they work no more & no less than one day
every weekday. they are working on a task that should output 2 units every
day on average. this output, however can be backloaded (same equation that is
used for backloading in the work contour).

therefore, if i were to look at something like the task usage page i could
see accumulated cost (daily rate that is not affected by output) and
accumulated output (backloaded, because they get faster as they go on, but
the average is set at 2/day). therefore i can see our spend and our output at
any given point in time.

this seems a very simple idea and i am not sure what other companies do to
manage this.

ellen

 

[davegb]

thanks for you reply. i am pretty surprised that this functionality is
exceptional though.
what i really want can be illustrated best on the task usage page.

person 1 gets paid $100/day and they work no more & no less than one day
every weekday. they are working on a task that should output 2 units every
day on average. this output, however can be backloaded (same equation that is
used for backloading in the work contour).

therefore, if i were to look at something like the task usage page i could
see accumulated cost (daily rate that is not affected by output) and
accumulated output (backloaded, because they get faster as they go on, but
the average is set at 2/day). therefore i can see our spend and our output at
any given point in time.

this seems a very simple idea and i am not sure what other companies do to
manage this.

I'm not sure either. As I said in my ealier post, this forum is about
projects, not production. I'm not even sure what you're trying to
track. Sounds like you know avg. output and want to track real output.
Project doesn't normally track that sort of thing. I can't think of
anything to add to my previous post. My guess is that other companies
who track this sort of thing either use a spreadsheet or production
specific software.

 

[Steve House]

It's not so much that the functionality you're looking for is exceptional.
It's just that it's not really a part of Critical Path Project Management
per se and so a project scheduling tool like MSP is not the best tool to use
for the job. A project deals with closed-ended activities. You need to
produce 100 widgets and then you're done, never to make widgets again. MSP
is aimed at figuring out how long it will take you to make those widgets and
how much you're going to have to pay for them. But it sounds like you need
it to figure out how many widgets get produced per man-hour of labour,
taking into account differing personal productivities and learning curves
and I'm afraid Project is just not geared for that.