Resource Types Report: Employees vs Contractors in a given month

[Dee]

I'm trying to create a report that shows how many employees vs contractors we
have assigned to specific tasks in a given month. I'm using MSP2007. I
created a export map to excel that allowed me to bring in the task name,
summary task name, start/end dates, resource names, and resource type (emp vs
con). The problem is when you create the pivot table, the data is counted
more than once. For example, a project is two months long, and a contractor
starts in month 1 and another starts in month 2 for a total of 2 contactors.
When you summarize the data, the total contractor number come out to three.
MSP is looking at the final finish date then summarizing from the earliest
start date.

Can anyone advise me on how to remedy this? Thanks!

 

[JulieS]

Hello Dee,

I'm sorry, but it is not clear to me what you have done by your
description so it's very difficult to advise on remedies. Are you
trying to count the number of tasks that contractors are doing versus
employees? I would have though that the number of hours each group is
working would be more meaningful.

You say you are using Project 2007 -- is there a reason why you didn't
use one of the built-in Resource Usage Visual reports to export the
data? I did a quick text with a project spanning approximately two
month with several resources in two groups -- external and internal.

I assigned the resources to tasks and used the Resource Work Summary
Report to show the total number of hours per month for each resource.
It is easy to add the Group field to the Pivot table data. I did not
see any over counting.

Give us more detail if you can and we'll try to be of more assistance.

I hope this helps. Let us know how you get along.

Julie
Project MVP

Visit http://project.mvps.org/ for the FAQs and additional information
about Microsoft Project

 

[Dee]

Julie,

I'm trying to get a count of employees vs. contractor (or internal vs.
external) assigned to a specific task. We want to track how many contractors
we're bringing into the organization to work on projects in a given month, so
the hours aren't valuable to us.

Unless I missed something, the Resource Summary reports under visual reports
did not give me the number of resource types. I wish I could attach or send
you my excel spreadsheet so you could see what I'm talking about. The only
way I could get internal vs external by project by month was to export to
excel pivotable, but the summary double counts when you have resources that
start on a different month but end in the same month.

Is that clearer?

 

[JulieS]

Hi Dee,

Sorry for the delay in replying. I've been puzzling over your
information and have a few comments/questions.

What I understand is that you want a simple count of the total number
of contracted resources working on tasks in your project on a monthly
basis. So a few questions:

If a contractor works a single day in a month, you wish to count that
as 1 contractor without worrying how many hours that contractor
actually did in the month?

What about a task that begins on the last day of the month (say March
31) and has a 5 day duration -- ending on April 4. Should that
contractor count once for March and again once for April? I think
this is the root of the "double" counting you may be seeing. Excel
will count two contractors for that 1 week time span if you group by
month.

If you have 5 contractors assigned to a single 1 day duration task,
should they be counted as five times more than a single contractor who
works 8 hours per day on a 20 day duration task?

What about the circumstance where you have a two month duration task
but have a contracted resource only working 3 days on that task? Do
you want to count just the 3 days, or the two months? By looking at
solely a task start and end dates you would have to count the resource
for two months.

Why I suggested looking at work and not just a count of how many times
someone from the "Contractors" group shows up in a month, was to try
to get something roughly equivalent to a FTE count based on hours and
not occurrences Again, I understand this is not what you are
currently being asked to provide but I think your numbers may be
subject to misinterpretation.

I hope this helps somewhat

Julie
Project MVP

Visit http://project.mvps.org/ for the FAQs and additional information
about Microsoft Project