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
• 00:14 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 cost 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.
• 00:47 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 need
• 01:00 to change our costs for the project, then we need to update those as well.
• 01:05 I'm going to show you how to do that in this lesson.
• 01:09 As we work through our project, we'll continue to ask our team members
• 01:13 if they need more time or less time to complete a particular activity.
• 01:18 Here I'm at this Create Architectural Design task.
• 01:22 If I look over here on the right, I can see that the Gantt chart is showing that
• 01:25 it's started but it's only about 25% done.
• 01:29 So I want to keep an eye on this architect task, and
• 01:33 ask if there's any new cost associated with it.
• 01:37 Or if the work will get done sooner.
• 01:40 Now the architect is gonna tell me, in this case,
• 01:42 that they need more time on the project.
• 01:45 So what I'm gonna do is open up my split view
• 01:49 by clicking down here on the bottom right of the screen and opening that up.
• 01:55 And then what I'll do is come over here to the grey area of the view and choose Work.
• 02:04 Remember, an architect is a work resource.
• 02:07 So right now, the architect is supposed to do 80 hours on this project.
• 02:12 They say they're just gonna need a little bit more.
• 02:14 Maybe 100 hours.
• 02:16 But they said don't worry, we'll still get it done in this 20 day time period.
• 02:21 So I'll just go ahead and type 100.
• 02:23 And press Enter twice.
• 02:26 That will update the cost for my project.
• 02:28 Now my project is going to cost more.
• 02:31 And you can see here, this is the total cost,
• 02:35 805,100 and here's the baseline, 800,100.
• 02:37 So I have a variance of $5,000, I'm now $5,000 over budget.
• 02:46 So now one of the things that I might do is talk to the general contractor.
• 02:50 The general contractor is down here.
• 02:53 And they say, well it's gonna cost $250,000 to purchase house materials.
• 02:59 So I ask the contractor if there's something that we can do to bring that
• 03:04 cost down.
• 03:05 So they talk to some suppliers and
• 03:07 they said we can bring the cost down by about $10,000.
• 03:11 So what I'm gonna do is right click, I just right clicked, and
• 03:16 choose Cost over here.
• 03:19 And now in the Cost field, because it's a cost-based resource,
• 03:22 I'm going to change this from $250,000 to $240,000.
• 03:29 Now you can see our total project is at 795,000 as opposed to 800,000.
• 03:38 We're now under budget even though we have an overage with our architect.
• 03:44 And this is the importance of keeping track of the hours and
• 03:48 the cost for your project.
• 03:51 But remember, try not to focus on getting too detailed with your updates.
• 03:57 For example, if we're over here talking to the architect, we don't need to ask them
• 04:02 if we go back to Work, we don't need to say what was your actual work and
• 04:07 remaining work, and things of that nature.
• 04:10 You can just focus on updating the percent complete and
• 04:13 modifying the work to meet the actual cost at the end of your updates.

Lesson notes are only available for subscribers.