EV and Cost-type Resource

[Annalisa]

Hi all.

A questions:

Why does MS Project 2007 not consider cost-type resources in PV, EV, and AC
but consider them for BAC and EAC?
In this way, if I assign a cost-type resource to an activity I will never
have a % phisical completion =100% for my project! (In fact, the % of
Phisical completion for upper-level activities are based on EV-related
values).

Thx.

 

[JulieS]

Hi Annalisa,

I'm afraid I can't answer the "why" question only to note that you are
correct, cost resources do not factor in to BCWS (PV), BCWP (EV), or
ACWP (AC).

However, your description the issue you are seeing with of Physical %
complete seems a bit odd. If I have tasks with Cost resources and
Work resource assigned and have set all tasks in the project to use
Physical % complete when calculating, the physical % complete does
roll up to the summary tasks. If you have a mixture of Physical %
complete and % complete tasks, it won't roll up. If you do a google
search on this newsgroup, you'll find a number of posts detailing the
steps to make sure physical % complete does work (mostly) correctly.

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

 

[salgud]

Hi all.

A questions:

Why does MS Project 2007 not consider cost-type resources in PV, EV, and AC
but consider them for BAC and EAC?
In this way, if I assign a cost-type resource to an activity I will never
have a % phisical completion =100% for my project! (In fact, the % of
Phisical completion for upper-level activities are based on EV-related
values).

Thx.

Taking a guess here. I suspect that it's not included in PV, EV and AC but
is in BAC and EAC because cost resources are probably not associated with
the more or less continuous flow of normal resource costs (hourly or
daily). EV depends on a somewhat consistent use of the resources. For
example, EVA should never include capital costs because they can fluctuate
so much during the course of the project, and in most cases, do not reflect
progress in any meaningful way. Since cost resources can't be recognized by
Project as anything other than a cost, it has no way of knowing whether the
cost will be evenly or consistently distributed over the life of the
project as normal resource costs would be. Ergo, eliminated from EVA
because they could easily obscure or even defeat the purpose of EVA.

Hope this helps in your world.