Welcome back to our course on Project 2013.
In this section we’re going to take our first look at resources, and by resources
I mean things like that people that are going to work on our projects, the materials that
we’re going to use, and the equipment that’s involved in building this house.
There are some other types of resource that we’ll look at a little bit later on in the
course.
But for the moment, for our house build project, we’re going to concentrate on the people
and the materials and the equipment.
Now when you’re looking at a Gantt Chart, which is a view in Microsoft Project that
most people use an awful lot of the time, you’re basically looking at the tasks involved
in your project.
If you want to look at the resources, there are a number of views specifically related
to resources.
Now if I click on the button below Gantt Chart there on the Task tab on the left, click on
that, I get a list of available views, and one of the available views is Resource Sheet.
And we click on Resource Sheet first and we’ll see a list of the resources that we currently
have on our project.
Note with the view that you’ve got a label on its side down the side just reminding you
which view you’ve got.
You’ve got the Resource Sheet View.
And another thing to note is that down at the bottom at the right hand end of the status
bar, as I mentioned earlier on, you’ve got some buttons to switch between the most commonly
used views.
Now the button on the left, the first one of those, the one that’s highlighted at
the moment is Gantt Chart.
So to switch back to Gantt Chart, I can just click on that and the one three to the right
of that is the Resource Sheet View.
So if I click on that, that switches me back to Resource Sheet.
They’re two of the views that you’re going to use the most while you’re working with
Microsoft Project.
Now let me set up some resources and one way of setting up resources is to set them up
in the Resource Sheet.
Now the first thing I’m going to do is to define a resource called Brick Layer.
Now a brick layer is a person who lays bricks.
And whenever there’s some brick laying to do, I’m probably going to assign a brick
layer to a task.
Now it’s very important to recognize here that I am not talking about a named person.
This isn’t the brick layer called John Doe or Jane Doe; this is a brick layer in general.
And there are some situations, perhaps in longer termed planning, where I may use a
resource of brick layer knowing that I need a brick layer but I don’t know specifically
which one yet.
And there are some situations where I may assign an individual straightaway, but more
of that later.
For the moment, we’ll just say brick layer.
The next thing we need to do is to click into the next field which is type and select a
type.
Now in many ways this choice is the most important one of all.
There are basically three resource types, although there is a special case that we’ll
talk about later as well.
But with those three resource types, it’s very important that you assign the correct
one.
Now as soon as I put the cursor into this type cell in the resource sheet, you’ll
see that a number of other fields got values on the right there.
Many of these are related to cost and we’re going to talk about cost later on, so I’m
really going to ignore the cost ones for the moment.
But a couple of these fields are important.
One of the ones that’s important is Max and the max field says what’s the maximum
number of this thing that we have available.
Now we’ll talk about maximum amounts and availability and so on later on as well, but
at the moment 100% means we’ve got one of these things.
We’ve got one brick layer.
So when we come to schedule the building of the house, having only one brick layer may
well turn out to be a very important thing.
Now another one of these cells which is actually quite important is the initials cell because
initials although it doesn’t really affect any of the calculations and so on that we’re
going to be doing, it does appear in a number of places particularly attached to the Gantt
Chart.
And it’s useful here to have a good abbreviation for the resource that we’re talking about.
So I’m going to put as my abbreviation here Brickie.
Now that’s a British abbreviation for brick layer but I think it’s probably used fairly
widely around the world as well.
Let me just point out here that I’ve got the entry bar when I’m working here on the
resource sheet, so I can type in there the abbreviation is going to be Brickie, tick
it, OK.
Now let me go back to type because type is actually the most important cell and that’s
one we need to look at carefully now.
In Project 2013, there are basically three types of resource and I want to look at each
of those types now.
There are some alternative approaches to costs and budgeting which sort of do lead you to
a fourth type of resource but it isn’t really a different type of resource at all.
We’ll talk about that briefly later on.
The three types of resource are work, material, and cost.
And for the purposes of this introduction, we’ll think of work as the people that are
working on our project, that are building our house.
So it will be people like the brick layers, the laborers, the plasterers, the painters,
and so on.
Materials are the resources that get consumed in the building of the house.
So this will be things like bricks, window frames, concrete, cement, mortar, and so on.
Cost, typically is other costs.
An example of a cost might be an account that’s used for various expenses on the project.
So we might have a pool or what in the U.K. would be called a petty cash account where
we might put travel expenses in there.
Now the way that these three different types are used within Microsoft Project are actually
quite different and particularly when we get to the area of working out costs, the way
that the three of them work is very different.
Let’s just stick with work for the moment.
Our brick layer as a person is a type of work resource.
And if you look over to those cost fields that I mentioned just now, you can see that
we have a standard rate, so a certain number of dollars per hour that we pay a brick layer.
And then we have an overtime rate, a certain number of dollars per hour that we pay on
overtime, extra time rate.
We also have another cost figure which is cost per use which is usually an additional
cost we may have to pay one off to use this resource.
Now when you’re talking about a brick layer, there may not be an additional cost per use
but you might also use a work resource type for something like a piece of digging equipment.
So you may have to hire a piece of digging equipment.
Maybe it’s going to cost $50 an hour while you’re doing the work on preparing the site,
and there may be a cost per use.
For example, a cost for the supplier of the digger equipment to deliver to your site and
collect it again at the end which is a one off additional cost.
Now the whole area of cost we’re going to look at later on, but I just wanted to point
out to you there that when you’re looking at work resources, the costs, generally speaking,
are based on the amount of time that something works on your project with the possible addition
of a cost per use figure as well.
Now let’s set up a material type of resource and the material type of resource that I’m
going to setup are bricks.
So I’ll type in Bricks.
This is a material resource.
Watch what happens when I select material to the other fields that have been filled
in there on the resource sheet.
You notice that what the default values are changed.
The standard rate is no longer per hour.
The standard rate is the cost.
There’s no overtime rate.
There is a cost per use.
Accrue.
I’ll talk about accruals later.
But I’m going to put here as the initials Bricks and now I’m going to talk about this
cell, this field here, Material.
Now I tend to think that that field name there, Material, isn’t a particularly helpful field
name because what that field actually represents is the units of measure of the material.
Now in the case of bricks, we’re going to talk about bricks in thousands.
So my unit of measure is going to be that, thousands.
I could put the word Thousands.
In fact, you can put anything you like in that field as long as it makes clear what
the units of measure are.
So in a typical house, I might use say around 10,000 to 15,000 bricks which means that this
particular material, bricks, if I wanted 12,000 bricks I would say 12 of this resource because
this resource is 1,000 bricks.
Now I’m not actually going to put any costs in there at the moment.
We’re going to come back to cost a little bit later on.
But let me just point out a couple of other things.
If I say select the bricks line and double click, I come up with a Resource Information
dialog, a bit like the Task Information dialog but this has got basically all of the information
you need about a specific resource.
Different tabs: General, Costs, Notes, Custom Fields.
We’ll look at many of these later on in the course.
One of the things to note here when you’re dealing with say costs is that you can show
rate changes over time.
So if over a particular period of time the cost of something is going to go up or down
or increase by a percentage, you can cover that within the resource information here.
So when it comes to things like costing, Microsoft Project is pretty powerful in terms of what
you can do.
Now we’ll come back to the Resource Information dialog in quite a bit more detail later on.
Now in the next section we’re going to look at assigning these resources to the tasks
within our project.
But now you’ve got your first exercise to do yourself.
I’m going to save this project as it is now as example_03, 0-3 in the supplied files.
And what I want you to do is to add some additional resources using the resource sheet.
Now the terminology you use may be different.
It’s absolutely not a problem.
Depending on your locale you may call a person that deals with wood in a building a joiner
or a carpenter, depending on where you are.
And you may use an abbreviation like a Chipee for a joiner.
But I’d like you to add as work type resources a carpenter or a joiner and I’d like you
to add as material resources windows and doors.
So, one resource is a window; it’ll be a single unit, and one resource will be a door.
Again, a door single unit.
Don’t worry about putting in the cost, the prices in there.
My answer to that question is in example file 04 and that’s going to be our starting point
for the next section.
So please join me for that.