Resource Assignment Status Updates

Quick reference

• 00:04 In the previous lesson, you learned what I refer to as task status updating.
• 00:10 That means you've gone to a particular task and you've updated the percent
• 00:15 complete or you've entered an actual start or actual finish date.
• 00:20 At any point in time, you can always enter a percent complete.
• 00:25 Now one thing that we have not updated is the costs for our project.
• 00:30 So if we go to the View tab, click the tables pick list and choose cost.
• 00:39 You'll remember that the resources on our tasks
• 00:42 have costs associated with them such as acquire land.
• 00:46 And we have hourly rate for resources like the architect.
• 00:51 And Microsoft Project is calculating these.
• 00:54 If we ever need to change the hours needed to work on particular tasks, or we
• 00:59 need to change our cost for the project, then we need to update those as well.
• 01:05 And I'm going to show you how to do that in this lesson.
• 01:08 As we work through our project we'll continue to ask our team members if
• 01:13 they need more time or less time to complete a particular activity.
• 01:18 Here I'm at this create architectural design task.
• 01:21 If I look over here on the right, I can see that the Gantt chart is showing that
• 01:26 it started but it's only about 25% done.
• 01:28 And so I want to keep an eye on this architect task and
• 01:31 ask if there's any new costs associated with it.
• 01:35 Or if the work will get done sooner.
• 01:38 Now the architect is going to tell me in this case that they
• 01:42 need more time on the project.
• 01:44 So what I'm going to do is open up my split view by Clicking down here
• 01:49 in the bottom right of the screen and opening that up.
• 01:53 And then what I'll do is come over here to to
• 01:57 the grey area of the view and choose work.
• 02:02 Remember an architect is a work resource.
• 02:05 So, right now the architect is supposed to do 80 hours on this project.
• 02:10 They say they're just going to need a little bit more, maybe 100 hours.
• 02:14 But they said, don't worry, we'll still get it done in this 20 day time period.
• 02:19 So, I'll just go ahead and type 100 and press Enter twice.
• 02:24 That will update the cost from my project.
• 02:26 Now my project is going to cost more.
• 02:29 And you can see here, this is the total cost 805,100.
• 02:34 And here's the baseline 800,100.
• 02:37 So I have a variance of $5,000.
• 02:40 I'm now $5,000 over budget.
• 02:44 So now one of the things that I might do is talk to the general contractor.
• 02:48 The general contractor is down here.
• 02:50 And they say, well, it's going to cost $250,000 to purchase house materials.
• 02:56 So I asked the contractor if there's something that we can do to bring
• 03:01 that cost down.
• 03:02 So they talked to some suppliers and
• 03:05 they said we can bring the cost down by about $10,000.
• 03:09 So what I'm going to do is right click, I just right clicked and
• 03:13 choose cost over here.
• 03:14 And now in the cost field because it's a cost based resource,
• 03:18 I'm going to change this from 250,000 to $240,000.
• 03:25 Now you can see our total project is at 795,000 as opposed to 800,000.
• 03:33 We're now under budget, even though we have an overage with our architect.
• 03:39 And this is the importance of keeping track of the hours and
• 03:43 the cost for your project.
• 03:46 But remember, try not to focus on getting too detailed with your updates.
• 03:51 For example, if we're over here talking to the architect,
• 03:55 we don't need to ask them if we go back to work.
• 03:59 We don't need to say what was your actual work and remaining work and
• 04:03 things of that nature.
• 04:04 You can just focus on updating the percent complete and
• 04:09 modifying the work to meet the actual cost at the end of your updates.

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