Scheduling and tracking question

[I-Ali]

Hi All:

Can you please help me address this situation?

On a project with only 4 tasks, I want 10 resources to have 5% of their
daily activity scheduled across the year. The 5% should never change as a
resource allocation but there actual numbers can be less then or greater than
the 5%. The start and finish date are the same for each task.

When their actual work is applied, it changes their Units (which I believe
is Peak alloc). Some resources have Units showing up as greater than 5%, what
worries me is that it is changing the work distributed on resources.

What is causing this to change the 5% alloc on the remainder of days. My
task settings are

Fixed Units
Finish No Earlier than (Finish date)
Effort Driven is unchecked.
Estimated? box is checked.

Any help on how to handle the issue is appreciated.

Thanks.

 

[Jim Aksel]

Monitor [Work], [Actual Work] and [Remaining Work]. In my world (because
other people do it differently), we track time card hours as [Actual Cost]
and enter the value in monetary units. This allows us to keep our [Baseline
Work] a constant value.

[Work]=[Actual Work]+[Remaining Work]


[Actual Work] is *not* a timecard field. [Actual work] represents the
amount of [Work] that was accomplished on the task, regardless of how many
hours I put on my timecard. Example: 260 day task, 5% untis is 104 hours of
effort. When I am 12 weeks in (60 days) and I am on schedule, Project says
this is 24 hours of [actual work] .... no matter what is on the timecard.
[Remaining Work] is 80. If i have more than 24 timecard hours I am over
budget, not ahead of schedule assuming the work estimate of 5% was correct.

If someone performs more than 5% units of work for a task, then you want to
readjust the remaining work down so [work] will remain constant. However,
that just pushes a budget problem to the end of the task.

It sounds like this is a Level of Effort Task ... so I would never touch
[work] and would just enter [actual cost] from the time keeping system. Note
that you can do this by creating a separate column such as [Time Card Hours]
from a handy text or number field. Then, you can use a formula to calculate
the cost for you such that [Actual Cost]=[Text1]*[ Standard Rate]

There's more to it than that, becuase this will have to be done in Resource
Usage View and then grouped using a custom group by.
You can also do it in Task Usage View but will have to run a Macro to copy
the standard rate to that view. For that, you can read in the FAQs here:
http://project.mvps.org/faqs.htm
YOu may find FAQ #7 and FAQ #37 helpful.

Long winded, but I hope it helps.