aam working on a project management assignment using Microsoft Project Pro
2003 and have built the task list. My next step is to develop a timephased
budget. I know how to figure out what I need but can not figure out where to
enter them into Project. Can anyone help me?
As you probably know, a time phased budget means that you break down your
resources and costs by time.
If you are using your schedule for estimating for a project, you might
figure out from your schedule that you use software developer X for 480
hours, developer Y for 520 hours etc. If developer X cost $D/hour and
developer Y costs $E/hour, etc. So you go ahead and quote for your project
by adding up the costs.
But this doesn't take into accoun that X and Y may be permanent or contract
employees and aren't there only for the hours that you need them. In
reality, you have to pay for them by the week, month, or whatever. So, you
break down your resource usage by phases of the project (startup,
development, etc - you figure out the phases by looking at your stages and
deliverables), look at the resources used in each phase, and work out what
you have to pay for them - whether they are being utilised or not in that
period. If they twiddle their thumbs waiting for things to happen for 20% of
the time, you still have to pay for them. You can then add these costs (for
the time you pay for them whether they are working or not) to estimate your
costs for the project.
Now, does MS Project do this for you? Not that I know of (but please tell if
it does). But what it will do is, if you manage to finetune your schedule
with resource levelling so that all resources are allocated 100% of the time
(and only 100% of the time) during which they are required, then the costs
from the schedule will be essentially the same as the costs from the time
phased budget.
If you need a time phased budget, I suggest
(i) produce a schedule in MS project
(ii) allocate resources to the schedule
(iii) manually level resources so they are allocated most
effectively/efficiently
(iv) look at your project and base it into phases
(v) draw a matrix outside of Project (e.g. a Word or Excel table) with the
phases and costs.
You then have a time phased budget.
So, in Project, your next task is presumably resource allocation and
resource levelling.
HTH
Lauchlan M
