Work based scheduling instead of duration based scheduling.

[Tony K]

I work for a company that provides engineering services to multiple clients
which is billed at an hourly rate to our clients.

We have recently purchased the MSP 2003 software to provide scheduling
management of our multiple projects based on hours (work) available from our
four resources.

Our intent is to schedule our projects based on a fixed length of time for
example one week. Our four resources are available for 45 hours each per week
which totals 180 hours. (work)

What advice can be shared for the set up of our project tasks that will
allow me to enter the start and finish dates for one week? Then assign our
four resources (work) to the task for that week? Then if I shorten or
lengthen the finish date of the task the percentage of our four resources
will adjust automatically increasing or decreasing based on the work I
assigned originally?

Basically I want to schedule based on (work) hours of the four resources not
by duration hours. In fact the duration based column and functionality does
not work with our work flow. We know that we have 180 hours per week to
schedule and if a task requires more resources then we can assign our
resources accordingly.

I hope this makes sense to someone that understands how MSP 2003 works.
Again I am new to this software and have been attempting to learn it on my
own with more frustration than progress.

Thanks in advance!

 

[Mike Glen]

Hi Tony,

Welcome to this Microsoft Project newsgroup

It sounds to me that you are just trying to schedule a group of resources so
that their time is filled week by week. Well, a project could be defined as
a unique undertaking which has a clearly defined start and finish and
requires the management of resources, time and money. It is the uniqueness
of the undertaking and its start and finish that makes it a project rather
than production.

So, first, you need to define your project in terms of its objective and
create a network of all the tasks necessary to meet the end product. Then
you can list the tasks in Project and link them logically by defining the
precedence relationships between them. Then you can enter the Duration of
each task in hours of work. Project will then give you a schedule,
calculating all the start and finish dates, including the project finish
date.

Finally, you assign resources to the tasks and level them to give you a
schedule. If the end date is unacceptable, you will have to amend the
assignments or work estimates to bring it in line.

Thus, your proposal of working week by week filling all the time, does not
work well with Project or any other project management package for that
matter. There may well be times when a particular resource has no scheduled
work to do on that project. You might be better off using Excel to plan and
monitor each resource's workload.

FAQs, companion products and other useful Project information can be seen at
this web address: http://project.mvps.org/faqs.htm

Hope this helps - please let us know how you get on

Mike Glen
MS Project MVP
See http://tinyurl.com/2xbhc for Project Tutorials

 

[Tony K]

Mike,

I may not have been clear on the work flow aspect of the management of
multiple projects.

We will have multiple projects for example six projects with deadlines and
milestones unigue to each project that will follow conventional MSP
sequential scheduling. The unigue aspect that I am after is instead of
entering days or hours in the duration field of a project to drive the finish
date of each task. I would like to manipulate the finish date of a task
without changing the start date with resources allocated to the task, thus
the resource allocation will adjust by requiring more or less time spent by
the resources on the task. I realize that I still have a duration of time for
the task, but at the same time I am not scheduling by entering duration of
time to control the finish date. I would be manipulating the finish date
manually.

I have created a resource pool file linking my resources to each project so
that when resources are allocated to the six projects the work load for the
resources is reflected in the resource pool file.

Thanks for your advice!

 

[Mike Glen]

You're welcome, Tony

Well, nobody can stop you from entering dates, but be aware that if you do,
Project will set constraints on them which will reduce the flexibility of
your project. Have you tried to do what you're asking? Try it on a copy or
set up a new simple project. Note that if you keep the start date static,
any movement you make to the finish date will automatically result in the
duration changing whether you like ot or not! You might like to have a look
at my series on Microsoft Project in the TechTrax ezine, particularly #11 on
task types. There is a table in the middle which gives you the effect of
changes you make. It's at this site: http://tinyurl.com/2xbhc or this:
http://pubs.logicalexpressions.com/Pub0009/LPMFrame.asp?CMD=ArticleSearch&AUTH=23
(Perhaps you'd care to rate the article before leaving the site,
Thanks.)

Mike Glen
MS Project MVP
See http://tinyurl.com/2xbhc for Project Tutorials

 

[ja202141]

Tony,

The relationship between Duration, Work, and Resource Units is the root
cause of your problem. Check out the following MS Training session if you
haven't already.

http://office.microsoft.com/training/training.aspx?AssetID=RC010779041033

You might be able to track your work by creating another Text field column,
but I don't think it's linked to the Gantt charts etc, so I don't think it
would do you much good.

Good luck!