Construction Project Planning

[Andrew]

I am in the Construction industry and for the most we use M/S project as a
scheduling tool. We do not employ direct labour other that our management
cost. We use subcontractors to do the building works, I would like to known
how I might use these resources as just fixed costs, eg: to build a kitchen
say 5000, this cost would be paid to the Carpenter as a fixed cost no matter
how long he takes to do the job. Also on larger tasks were interim payments
are made on fixed costs can monthly baseline be saved?
Thank you

 

[John]

I am in the Construction industry and for the most we use M/S project as a
scheduling tool. We do not employ direct labour other that our management
cost. We use subcontractors to do the building works, I would like to known
how I might use these resources as just fixed costs, eg: to build a kitchen
say 5000, this cost would be paid to the Carpenter as a fixed cost no matter
how long he takes to do the job. Also on larger tasks were interim payments
are made on fixed costs can monthly baseline be saved?
Thank you

Andrew,
The Fixed Cost field is tailor made for handling fixed contract types of
effort. You can read more about it in the Project Help file, or, add the
Fixed Cost field as a column in your view. Then hover your mouse over
the column heading. In a second or two a drop down help link will appear.

With regard to your second question, yes, monthly baselines can be
saved, however, baselines don't have a lot of meaning for fixed cost
effort. Fixed cost is fixed cost - the only time I can see that you
might want to baseline a fixed cost task is if the contract is
re-negotiated and you want to keep track of the original contract price.

Hope this helps.
John
Project MVP

 

[Andrew]

John

Thanks for the help the fixed cost field does seam to be very useful,
however I do still have the problem with fixed baseline, or maybe this is not
the correct term I am using, so please let me explain further.
Let’s assume my subcontractor is working on a task which has a fixed cost
and is 6 months long. Now the subcontractor has presented me with an interim
payment cash flow plan. The subcontractor is clearly forecasting the value of
work he intends to deliver throughout the 6 month period. It states that
there is a payment in each month, lets say month 1, 2000 month2 3000, month3
5000 etc, etc.
This information now allows me to track performance against his planed cash
flow through Earned Value Management. The big question is can this be done
in MSP and how?

Many thanks
Andrew

 

[Andrew]

Trevor

Thanks very much for your detailed response, It does seem MSP does have some
limitations, I am hoping either your self or John can help me over come some
of them.
The type of contracts we work on Design and Build which mean the contractors
have to supply us with fixed and firm prices. We don’t care if 5 guys or 15
guys turn up to do the job so long as it is finished on time according to the
contract or penalties can occur. Were or job really lies is in the
monitoring and controlling of the contractors. On project were interim
payments are made during the life cycle of the project we need to check
performance against planned costs. If you see the question a ask John there
is an example of what I mean.
Many Thanks

Andrew

 

[John]

John

Thanks for the help the fixed cost field does seam to be very useful,
however I do still have the problem with fixed baseline, or maybe this is not
the correct term I am using, so please let me explain further.
Let’s assume my subcontractor is working on a task which has a fixed cost
and is 6 months long. Now the subcontractor has presented me with an interim
payment cash flow plan. The subcontractor is clearly forecasting the value of
work he intends to deliver throughout the 6 month period. It states that
there is a payment in each month, lets say month 1, 2000 month2 3000, month3
5000 etc, etc.
This information now allows me to track performance against his planed cash
flow through Earned Value Management. The big question is can this be done
in MSP and how?

Many thanks
Andrew

Andrew,
Sorry I didn't see your response until this morning or I would have
replied earlier.

What you are looking for is really a financial spreadsheet and Project
is not designed to do that. You might be better off using Excel. However
you could try the following. Go to Tools/Options/Calculation tab and
uncheck the option to have Project calculate actual costs - that
basically says you will enter actual costs yourself. Then on the Task
Usage view, display Fixed Cost and Actual Cost in the timescaled data
(data on the right). You might also want to display Baseline Cost but be
sure to set the baseline before you do the next step. You can now enter
the subcontractors cash flow plan in the Actual Cost cells for each time
period. As you enter progress in the Percent Complete field you will see
the Fixed Cost values change based on progress. You can then use a
combination of the actual cost values entered and the stored baseline
values for comparison.

Hope this helps.

John
Project MVP

 

[gja]

Hello Trevor,

I do agree that in terms of Project Management that Scope, Time, and Cost
are inter-realted. However, it seems like Andrew and I have a similar
responsibility - we need to track projects that have tasks with fixed costs.
In my work all the details of cost are worked out in seprate agreements and
as manager I just need to keep track of all activities and make sure things
tasks are being completed on-time. It is almost reverse in terms of budget. I
start with a project with a number of tasks that have thier own respective
costs with associated funding sources. As the project takes place payments
are made from the funding sources and a balance remains. Do you know if
starting with a fixed cost then manually entering in actual costs will work
for this using MS Project 2007?

 

[Steve Tiedeman]

--
Design-build contractor moving more toward hands on project management

 

[Steve Tiedeman]

Hi Andrew I have the same questions regarding fixed contract costs so I am
curious which option you chose to enter your sub trades fixed costs .
also how would you enter extra's for each sub trade?