quantifying task deliverables

[Scott Johnson]

I want to define deliverables for specific tasks, such as

task: Review documents ( 60 documents

I had thought to insert a column with a customized field in order to capture the number of fields and later calculation statistics such as "# of hours per document reviewed." What is the most appropriate field type for this column, for this task

Thanks, Scott

 

[John]

Scott,
There are several ways to approach this type of effort. Is the
completion of each document worth a certain amount of earned value? If
so, you might consider using a recurring task, (Insert/Recurring Task)
particularly if each document has a specific due date. That way each
document reviewed can be easily tracked.

Another method is to simply show a single line task (or break the review
process into groups of like documents) and use %Complete to define how
many documents have been reviewed at any given point in time. With this
method it is easy to develop the statistic you mention by simply
dividing the total Actual Hours by the number of documents.

I don't quite follow the idea of using a cutom field to capture the
"number of fields". What fields? A single spare number or text field can
capture the statistic of hrs/doc for each "review documents" task. A
second spare field might be used to calculate an overall hrs/doc for all
"review documents" tasks.

I hope this is helpful.
John

 

[Scott Johnson]

Thanks for your advice, John

I don't need to consider earned value for each document, so your suggestion to show the task as a single line is great.

But "% of completion" for the "review documents" is not adequate because it does not tell me the number of documents completed.

Therefore, I will capture the number of "reviewed documents" in an inserted "number column" and later calculate the statistic "# of hours per document reviewed."

Does this make sense

Thanks for your help

 

[John]

Scott,
I suggested %Complete because I thought the number of documents for a
given review task was known (e.g. 60). Percent Complete is then a simple
formula: (Num Reviewed)/60 x 100%. However, your method will work fine
also and does provide a way to directly enter the number of completed
documents. If you want to show progress though you will not be able to
directly populate the %Complete field from the custom number field using
a formula. However, it can be done with a simple VBA macro as follows:

Assume the total number of documents to be reviewed is in Number1
and the number of documents reviewed thus far is in Number2,

sub doc_progress()
For Each t in ActiveProject.Tasks
If Not t is Nothing Then
t.PercentComplete = t.Number1/t.Number2 x 100
End If
Next t

John