Project duration based upon lump sum cost
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From: "Steve House" sjhouse at hotmail dot on 25 Feb 2010 06:46 The problem you'll face is that the duration, cost, etc of the project is calculated from the task detail level up and MS Project doesn't have any way to reverse the process and distribute costs or durations downwards from the project totals to the individual task levels. Consider a project with 5 tasks and you've quoted a cost of $10,000. You can certainly say that since your resources cost $100 per hour, the duration of that project needs to be 100 hours. But then you're stuck ... is that 20 hours on each task, 10 hours each on 1 through 4 with 60 hours on 5, just the reverse, or something in between? There's no way to automate that process of distributing duration (or costs). Due to the varying nature of each task, it is impossible to develop an accurate algorithm to that will do it properly - project has no idea of the nature of the work itself. Since the project's duration is determined by the net contributions of the individual task durations and schedules and not the other way around, it won't work. -- Steve House MS Project Trainer & Consultant "rbwillis" <rbwillis(a)discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message news:D26C596C-C405-4C08-BAFB-AEFC5527A9D6(a)microsoft.com... > Actually we work on projects for a fixed cost. The object is to get the > work > done just as (or before) the money runs out. If we succeed then we earn > the > profit built into our fee. If we go beyond, then profit reduces > accordingly. > What I want to do with MS Project is to forecast the work load for > resources. As engineering consultants, we often continue to tweak on > projects long after we should have stopped, seeing profits dwindle in the > process. I'm hoping to be able to give staff an estimate of just how long > (at how hard, i.e. %) they have to complete the work. Money runs out, put > your pencils down. With several project ongoing at once we tend to wait > till > the deadline is upon us and then scramble to complete the work. I'd like > to > be able to pace ourselves by adjusting the % availability so as not to get > into a crunch. I know it's counter intuitive to how MS Project is > designed > in it's base form, namely Resource x Duration = Project Cost. I simply > need > find out how to get Project Cost / Resource = Duration. Thanks for any > insight you can offer. > |