Professional Scheduling

[Shane Garlick]

My organization uses something called professional scheduling. It works something like this:
- An employee is salaried, let's say $1000 per week. This calculates out to $25/hour
- Technically, he will work 40+ hours per week
- He's assigned several tasks to complete during the week. For simplicity sake, let's say 5 and each takes 8 hours each.

If he works 40 hours during the week, the cost associated to completing these tasks will be $25 per hour. If he works less than 40 it's still $25 per hour because the other time is taken up with something else (i.e. sick pay, vacation, etc). Easy!

Now, if he works 48 hours, 12 hours each on two of the tasks and 8 hours on the other three, everything changes. He still only gets $1000 for that weeks work, but now it calculates out to $20.83 per hour. In other words, the hourly rate used to calculate the cost of the assignment depends on how many hours he actually works, if he works over 40 hours.

Is there an easy way to set this up, or do I have to write a VBA script that will recalculate a persons rate every week, based on the actual hours he/she worked, then enter it, with a date, as a new entry into the cost rate table? If this is how it needs to happen, do you have any suggestions? I'm not new to VBA programming, but I am in Project programming.

Thx

 

[Steve House]

This is very different from the way Project calculates the costs of
tasks/projects. Your resource is shown in the resource table with a
standard rate of $1000 / week. Project prorates that to $25 per hour. When
he assigned to a task, the assignment percentage and the duration estimate
are used to calculate a man-hours value for the work. That is multiplied by
the hourly rate to calculate the cost of the task. IF some portion of that
total work is explicitly identified as overtime, the same calculation is
done with rate listed in the Overtime Rate column and the 2 are summed.
(That's why I recommend to my classes that for exempt employees they put the
same value in the Standard and Overtime Rate fields and NOT to leave the
overtime blank as many sources do for resources who aren't entitled to
actual overtime pay.) So if your guy is working 1/2 day on a project task
and doing other things the rest of the week, Project will carry that cost at
$100, not the $1000 you use. Remember Project's entire focus is TASK costs,
not total resource costs to the firm. To Project's way of thinking, the
monies paid to your resource if he's off sick or working on non-project
related activities for part of the week are NOT a part of the Project costs
at all - it's not interested in his total cost to your firm but just that
portion of his total cost that directly produces the project's deliverables.

Was thinking a custom field might do it but since the test for your
calculation varies based on the total hours in a week and not the hours for
the individual tasks I don't think that will work after all. I think I'd
export the raw data over to Excel and set it up there.
--
Steve House
MS Project MVP
Visit http://www.mvps.org/project/faqs.htm for the FAQs

My organization uses something called professional scheduling. It works something like this:
- An employee is salaried, let's say $1000 per week. This calculates out to $25/hour
- Technically, he will work 40+ hours per week
- He's assigned several tasks to complete during the week. For simplicity

sake, let's say 5 and each takes 8 hours each.

If he works 40 hours during the week, the cost associated to completing

these tasks will be $25 per hour. If he works less than 40 it's still $25
per hour because the other time is taken up with something else (i.e. sick
pay, vacation, etc). Easy!

Now, if he works 48 hours, 12 hours each on two of the tasks and 8 hours

on the other three, everything changes. He still only gets $1000 for that
weeks work, but now it calculates out to $20.83 per hour. In other words,
the hourly rate used to calculate the cost of the assignment depends on how
many hours he actually works, if he works over 40 hours.

Is there an easy way to set this up, or do I have to write a VBA script

that will recalculate a persons rate every week, based on the actual hours
he/she worked, then enter it, with a date, as a new entry into the cost rate
table? If this is how it needs to happen, do you have any suggestions? I'm
not new to VBA programming, but I am in Project programming.