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About this lesson
When you update resource assignments, you are updating the time a person requires for the task or updating the costs for a task.
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2013, 2019/365.
Exercise files
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Resource Assignment Status Updates.mpp489.5 KB Resource Assignment Status Updates - Completed.mpp
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Quick reference
Resource Assignment Status Updates
When you update resource assignments, you are updating the time a person requires for the task or updating the costs for a task.
Steps
To update the work for resources, follow these steps:
- Click the view tab and then click the details checkbox.
- Use the work or cost views in the details (split) view.
- 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.
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