Budgeting costs for internal resources & summary tasks

[Christine Pouliot]

I have two questions related to entering realistic
budgeted costs into our project.
1. We have internal resources used on the project where
the cost is their loaded salary times duration on the
project, regardless of hours booked against the project.
I've seen the ability to put a fixed cost per use, but
what I really need is a fixed cost per resource per week.
Is there a way I can record this in project?
2. I also want to budget time at a summary task, and have
resources record time at a detail task level. Is this
possible. The example is a task that will last the
duration of the project like - rollout support for 440
days, but I want to track hours at more detailed level,
for example I have 2 staff and they will perform tasks,
like model management, design review, functional testing.
I don't really want to try to guess an allocation to these
detail tasks if I can avoid it. Any ideas?
Thanks,

 

[Jim Peters]

Christine Pouliot,

A couple of thoughts on your questions:
Your first question on rates...
If you set the Standard Rate to their loaded salary (either hourly or
weekly) and then set their overtime rate to zero. Then make sure that the
overtime hours are captured as overtime and not regular hours. Thus if your
team is on a 40 hour work week, it becomes clear that all hours beyond 40
receive no monetary reward (and presumeably will be compensated in some
other way such as a huge end of year bonus). If your team does not work the
expected minimum the cost will be less than you desire.

Your second question on budgeting ...
First, you have to pick one level at which to make a resource assignment.
You cannot have a resource assigned to the Summary level and to a
subordinate task without causing confusion. If this issue is that the
budgeting process is different than the planning and estimating process,
then I suggest you model your use of project to reflect this instead of
trying to mix the Budgeting and Project Management roles. One method is:
In the role of the Budget person:
1. Insert a "budgeting task" immediately below the summary task and assign
the resources that you are budgeting for the work to the budgeting task
2. Enter the planned work for each resource assigned to the budgeting task.
3. Save the baseline to one of the alternate baselines (1-10) and Never use
the designated baseline again for this project.
4. Publish your reports/get approval for the project.

In the role of the Project Manager:
5. Assign resources to detailed tasks with estimates.
6. Set the work amount to zero on the Budgeting task.
7. Save the Baseline (not required but it eliminates any possibility that
the Budgeting Task will have non-zero values in the Baseline field)
8. Create "No Budgeting Tasks" filter to prevent the Budgeting Task from
cluttering the day-to-day working version of the project schedule.

Now, if you include Baseline Work and Baseline1 Work (or whatever Baseline
1-10 you selected as your budget baseline) in task or resource usage views,
you will be able to compare your Budget amounts by resource to your Planned
amounts and eventually your Actual amounts. This technique allows the
Project Manager (and the team) to own the project, create their own
estimates and baselines, and track their work at the detail level. It allows
the Budgeting person to create Summary level budgets and not have these lost
once the project and real assignments are made.

Good luck,
Jim Peters