First, you need to consider something. If you planned to spend $100 and you
only spent $80 you have no idea if you are $20 ahead or $50 behind. What was
the value of the work that was performed? You planned to do $100 worth of
work. Just because you spent $80 does not mean you received $80 worth of
value. If you bid to lay bricks at $1/brick you planned to lay 100 bricks.
It cost you $80 but how many bricks were actaully laid for that $80?
If it was 80 bricks you are behind schedule but on cost. If it was 100
bricks you are on schedule and under cost. If it was 40 bricks you are
behind schedule and you are going to over run. If it was 90 bricks you are
behind schedule and under cost. If it was 130 bricks you over bid the job.
With all that said, here is what Project can do for you:
Project will allow you to create tasks with associated resources, work, and
costs which can also be saved in a baseline (Tools/Tracking/Save
Baseline...). You can use fields for Cost, Work, Actual Cost, Remaining Cost.
Some are entered, others are calculated. To do this properly, you need to
save a baseline.
You will also need to have project set for manual "actual cost"
(Tools/Options/Calculations)
Set a Status Date (Project/Project Information)
Enter the Actual Costs in the Actual Cost column
Enter the %Complete in the %Complete field
Your planned spend to the status date is constained in the field BCWS
(Budgeted Cost of Work Scheduled) [Called Planned Value or PV in Project
2007], THe value of the work performed is Budgeted Cost of Work Performed
(BCWP) [Called Earned Value EV in Project 2007]. You Actual Cost of Work
Performed (ACWP) [Called Actual Cost AC in Project 2007]. Project will
calculated BCWP for you based on %Complete.
Project will calculate timephased values for BCWS, BCWP, ACWP (you enter
this in the Acual Cost column). It will also calculate Cost Variance (CV and
CV%), Schedule Variance (SV and SV%). Just insert the columns. You can also
calculate Estimate at Complete (EAC) by altering values in the Remaing
Work/Cost fields.
Reporting can be done two ways. Project reports are OK, Project2007 reports
are better. In Project 2003, try View/Reports... select cost and then Earned
Value. There are other cost reposts as well. In Project2007, Reports are on
the main menu, you can select the stand reports or Visual reports. The
visual reports allow you to export to Excel2003 or later.
In Project 2003, you can also use Analze Timescaled Data in Excel which is a
button on the Analysis tool bar. View/Toolbars/Analysis. This allows you to
send things to Excel for further analysis. In Project 2007 this is
essentailly the visual reports.
Now, for some advice. Project is prbably not the best tool to do this. You
may want to consider just doing it all in Excel. What I have explained is
the way to "do it right" in general terms. If you do not want to put in the
effort to make Project do this work for you, I suggest you use Excel.
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If this post was helpful, please consider rating it.
Jim
Visit
http://project.mvps.org/ for FAQs and more information
about Microsoft Project
