total work?

[Itai Raz]

Hi,

I'm sure there must be something I'm missing here.
I could never find a way to present "total work" for a project that
does not have resources assigned to its tasks.
Seems like something trivial - you start a project, you list all the
tasks and their durations, and then you want to see the overall work
which will be required for this project in man days/weeks/months/hours
(in order to decide, for instance, how many resources to assign to this
project). One way I found was to assign a dummy resource to all tasks
and then look at the total work or simply use leveling so that the
project spreads out sequentially. This is stupid, though - having to go
over every task in the project assigning a dummy resource to it. Not to
mention the fact that I have to make sure I skip all summary tasks on
the way, otherwise I get discrepancies.

Isn't there a report that just summarizes the amount of work involved
in the project, regardless of resources?

Thanks,

--itai

 

[Gérard Ducouret]

Hello Itai,
A little faster than assigning a generic resource on each elementary task,
you can insert the Work column and enter directly the Work load of each
task. But you can't do that directly at the project level.

 

[Jan De Messemaeker]

Hi,

I do like your approach but you can do it much much faster
In tools, options, view, cross out Show Summary Tasks
Select all tasks
Click the task information button on the toolbar
In the Resources pad type "Dummy"

That's all.
HTH
--
Jan De Messemaeker
Microsoft Project Most Valuable Professional
http://users.online.be/prom-ade/
+32-495-300 620

Hello Itai,
A little faster than assigning a generic resource on each elementary task,
you can insert the Work column and enter directly the Work load of each
task. But you can't do that directly at the project level.
--
Gérard Ducouret [Project MVP]

Hi,

I'm sure there must be something I'm missing here.
I could never find a way to present "total work" for a project that
does not have resources assigned to its tasks.
Seems like something trivial - you start a project, you list all the
tasks and their durations, and then you want to see the overall work
which will be required for this project in man days/weeks/months/hours
(in order to decide, for instance, how many resources to assign to this
project). One way I found was to assign a dummy resource to all tasks
and then look at the total work or simply use leveling so that the
project spreads out sequentially. This is stupid, though - having to go
over every task in the project assigning a dummy resource to it. Not to
mention the fact that I have to make sure I skip all summary tasks on
the way, otherwise I get discrepancies.

Isn't there a report that just summarizes the amount of work involved
in the project, regardless of resources?

Thanks,

--itai

 

[davegb]

Hi,

I do like your approach but you can do it much much faster
In tools, options, view, cross out Show Summary Tasks
Select all tasks
Click the task information button on the toolbar
In the Resources pad type "Dummy"

That's all.
HTH

Jan,
Wouldn't this assign resources to all his Summary tasks as well? That
could cause problems later on when he's tracking...
Also, curious about your use of the term "cross out". Does this mean
turn on the Project Summary Task? If so, in American English, it's a
bit confusing. Over here, "cross-out" means to draw a line through
something, like an item on a todo list, meaning it's done.

 

[Jan De Messemaeker]

Hi,

I should have written Check Out or Wipe out, I do not know.
By all means, remove the check from the checkbox.
When summary tasks are not shown, they are not part of the selection when
you select all.
HTH

 

[Gérard Ducouret]

Hello Dave,

I think that Jan wanted to say *clear* the "Show summary tasks" check box,
so that not any summary will be assigned a resource.

Gérard

 

[Steve House [Project MVP]]

Until resources assignments are known, it is impossible to say how much work
is involved in the project. If I say "paint the building" with a duration
of 5 days, that tells me nothing about the amount of work that will be
required. It might be a small building that one painter could do in a week,
requiring 40 man-hours of work to do, or a very large building that would
require 100 painters working at once to get everything done in one week's
time and requiring a total of 4000 man-hours of work. Until we assign the
resources, we simply don't know.

A more fundmental question to be asking yourself, if you don't have any idea
how much work a particular task might require, is where did you come up with
the estimate of the duration that you have put into the plan to begin with?
You can't just pluck durations from thin air or set them by wishful thinking
or even, frankly, by the process of "we need this to get done in xx weeks."
In order to have a rational duration estimate, as you enter the tasks you
need to look at them and ask yourself "what does this task produce and in
what quantity, what skills are required to achieve it, who do I have who has
those skills, and how long will it probably take him to do it?"

HTH

 

[Jim Walker]

I don't know of any way to show work without assigning resources. However, I
have used the following technique for years to determine how many resources
are needed on a project.

I manage I.S. projects so there are multiple skill sets involved: Business
Analysts, Systems Analysts, Developers, QA staff and business reps. It is
important for me to know how much work belongs to each of these groups so
assigning a skill set to each task is a useful exercise. If you set up the
plan properly you can adjust the "max units" for each of the skill sets to
assign different numbers of resources to the project and see the effects on
end date.

 

[BatZzZz]

When I ask a question about MS-Project, what I'm looking for is a
technical answer, and not some opinion how I don't know what I'm doing.
In the 15 years I've been doing this, I must have been doing it all
wrong. I'm glad enlightment could come in the form of painting a
building example.

As I said, when I list all my tasks I can also estimate their
durations. Duration being "how long would it take my average programmer
to do this". Once I finish assigning all of the estimated durations, I
can know how much this project is "worth" in terms of man-days. I can
then take this number to the people handling the budgets and tell them,
look, we have about 1 man-year worth of work here. If we have a year,
let's hire a person and have them start. If we have less than a year, 2
people can definitely work on this together, so 2 people would mean 6
months. We could, in fact, assign up to 6 people and have to work
divided pretty evenly between them, so that we cut the project time to
2 months (+QA afterwards). More than 6 people are likely to start
lowering the ROI of each person.

In order to start this thought process, I need to know how much work
I'm facing, in total man-days. I never even assigned the people yet,
but I have a pretty good idea of what an average programmer would take
to do this.

To put it into what seems to be your area of expertise - say I have a
50 floor building, that I need to paint. It would take me 10 years to
do it alone, but if I hire 10 more people, it will take me 1 year. I
KNOW how much an average person can paint per day, so I can allow
myself to make the estimations. If I hire more than 10 people, it
starts becoming inefficient, and some of my employees would not be able
to work without disturbing someone else, so 10 is likely the maximum
number of people. Now we have a few questions of - how much time do we
have, how many people can we afford, how many people can we find in the
time-frame that we have, etc. etc.

In order to start I need to know what's the total amount of work in man
days that it takes to paint a 50 stories building.

Unfortunately, project doesn't give me a convenient way of getting this
estimation.

The other methods given here for assigning dummy resources are
excellent! thanks.

 

[Steve House [Project MVP]]

I gave you a technical answer designed to inform you about the way that
Project functions. I never said you didn't know what you were doing. You
have your own style and way of working and if they work for you that's fine.
But you did not appear to know precisely how *Project* approached those same
issues, which is something totally different from not knowing what you are
doing. When you use a product like MS Project you have to adapt your style
of working and your use of the terminology to its programmed parameters - it
won't adapt itself to yours unless you can rewrite it. One may be able to
come up with a workaround if it's not programmed to work exactly the way you
have habitually done but most workarounds usually carry hidden pitfalls.

Project defines work and duration with precise technical meanings which are
the foundation of the answer I gave you. Those definitions are also
consistent with the ANSI accepted standards of project management practices
as described in the PMBOK. MS Project also follows the ANSI standards in
the manner in which it handles the relationship between work and duration as
well as the meaning of the terminology. In your example you may choose to
call duration "how long it will take my average programmer to do this" if
you like but MS Project and the PMBOK would both call that an estimate of
"work" and not of "duration." It is not a trivial distinction because
Project is programmed so there is an exact and inviolate mathematical
relationship between work and duration (W=D*U) that is indeterminate until
the resource allocation units are also known, hence my assertion that
estimates of duration based on estimates of work are meaningless until the
resource context is also known and "U" can be assigned a non-arbitrary
value.

Also understand that you are not the only one reading these messages - they
are not personal two-party conversations between you and your company's or
Microsoft's help desk. Any answer to your questions need to be phrased in
such a way so that not only you, someone with 15 years experience, gets
something from the discussion but also the next reader, a 22 year-old
administrative assistant just out of school whose first exposure to "project
management" was yesterday when her boss installed MS Project on her
workstation and told her to enter some tasks can get some benefit from it as
well. Years ago I worked in talk radio and the station's program director
would constantly remind all the on-air talent "your callers are NOT your
audience" and the same principle applies here - the persons posting
questions are absolutely not the primary audience reading the answers. I
would even venture to guess that similar statistics would apply here as in
radio and less than 1% of the people reading this forum will ever post a
question or comment to any discussion group. Any answers to your questions
have to be phrased with them in mind as well as you, framed so they are
intelligible to someone with far less than your 15 years of experience.
IMHO, the best way to give a technical answer is to give a clear, generic,
and trivial example such as painting the building so that both you and the
PM newbie can readily visualize the underlying principles and get some
insight into the inner workings of the program. Since one of the most
common root causes of all manner of problems people have in using Project
boils down to their confusion in the fundamental conceptual differences
between work and duration, any discussion of related issues needs to have a
review of those differences with illustrations the Project newbie can easily
see.
--
Steve House [MVP]
MS Project Trainer & Consultant
Visit http://www.mvps.org/project/faqs.htm for the FAQs

 

[BatZzZz]

OK. I accept the comment.

Still, if anyone in MS in listening, I have heard more than a few
people complaining about this exact issue. Especially in the software
world, which is probably a significant portion of Project users, in
most cases the tasks in project are broken into "one man" tasks. It
would have been so nice to be able to say "assume 100% resource" for
the entire project, just in order to see how much it's "worth" in man
days. You can then start negotiating about the number of people you get
to hire for the project, the budget, number of new machines, licenses,
etc. etc.
I'm telling you guys, it's a useful feature.

 

[WildBill]

Hmm, this thread has brought an AHA moment for me. I was looking for the same
information for probably similar reasons, and I think I found a way to get
it, but also realized that the "it" I found only makes sense some of the time
(as it does in BatZzZz's case). I'm just getting back into using Project, so
please forgive me if I say something stupid. But I'm writing this to check my
understanding as much as to share advice, so please let me know if I'm wrong.

First, the way to get the total hours is to look at each resource's
"Cumulative Work" chart under the "Resource Graph" view. The right-most value
on the X axis is that resource's total work for the project. Add them for the
total effort in the project for budgeting.

Second, it doesn't make sense for Project to add them for me because
resources are not equal. If I schedule the keyboard and the programmer one
hour each as separate resources, for some silly reason, that is not two hours
of work. Or, if a janitor and a CEO sit down together for an hour meeting,
that's not terribly meaningful to roll up to a total of two hours work either.

 

[John]

Hmm, this thread has brought an AHA moment for me. I was looking for the same
information for probably similar reasons, and I think I found a way to get
it, but also realized that the "it" I found only makes sense some of the time
(as it does in BatZzZz's case). I'm just getting back into using Project, so
please forgive me if I say something stupid. But I'm writing this to check my
understanding as much as to share advice, so please let me know if I'm wrong.

First, the way to get the total hours is to look at each resource's
"Cumulative Work" chart under the "Resource Graph" view. The right-most value
on the X axis is that resource's total work for the project. Add them for the
total effort in the project for budgeting.

Second, it doesn't make sense for Project to add them for me because
resources are not equal. If I schedule the keyboard and the programmer one
hour each as separate resources, for some silly reason, that is not two hours
of work. Or, if a janitor and a CEO sit down together for an hour meeting,
that's not terribly meaningful to roll up to a total of two hours work either.

WildBill,
I'll take issue with your example of the CEO and janitor. It definitely
IS two hours of work. An hour is an hour no matter who's time it is. The
important difference is the cost. Most likely the CEO is paid a few more
dollars per hour than the janitor and therefore his hour of time is
going to cost the project more money than the janitor's hour.

If the task for the CEO and janitor is to come up with the company's 5
year plan, the CEO will probably (although this could be a stretch) do
it more quickly than the janitor so on this particular task, resources
are not equal. However, if the task is to help build a Habitat for
Humanity house then it is likely the CEO and janitor are equivalent
resources.

The bottom line is, the Work field in a task view DOES represent the
total amount of effort put forth by the resources assigned to the task.
But as explained above, Cost is the driving factor for budget.

Hope this helps.
John
Project MVP