Alignment of WBS and CBS Structures

[JeffCannedy]

I am trying to link Work Breakdown Structures to Cost Breakdown Structures
using a standardized CBS from our company's AFE templates. The AFE templates
typically use a CBS suffix, (i.e. 100 - Project Management, 200 - Contract
Engineering, 300 - Construction Services) these are all at a level 2, with
subsequent level 3 and 4 descriptions. This has provided some valuable
information on the financial reporting side of the business. Our business
works well using MSP instead of Primavera, so we are now trying to link our
schedule to the same suffixes as our CBS. That is , 100 - Project
Management, 200 - Contract Engineering, 300 - Construction Services. Trouble
is we haven't found an easy way to do this. I was hoping that we could add
the CBS to resource definition, but haven't found a way to do so.

Help!

 

[JulieS]

Hello Jeff,

If I understand your post correctly, you are trying to get more detailed
costing information from a project plan broken down by specific
categories.

I'm a bit muddled about whether you want to assign the category to the
resource, the task, or the assignment however. If you want to apply
"100-Project Management" to a resource, have you tried either the Group
field in the Recourse sheet or adding the Phonetics field and keying the
information there? Both the Group field (Resource Group viewed in a
Task view) and the Phonetics field (Resource Phonetics viewed in a task
view) will carry information from resources to tasks.

If you wish to apply the outline to tasks, have you considered using a
custom task outline field with your CBS numbers and descriptions? You
could then use the customize task outline field to create custom groups
which would then total the costs by outline code.

If you wish to apply the cost break down codes to assignments, a custom
field added either to the Task Usage or Resource Usage view should give
you the same option for custom groups. You'll need to set up the custom
group so it groups assignments not tasks or resources.

Give us a bit more information (including what version of Project,
please) and we'll try to be a bit more specific in recommendations.

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