Chapter 9: Defining Project Resources and Costs

Overview

In this chapter, use of Microsoft Project moves into a new and exciting phase. For many small projects, it may be enough to create a simple project plan by setting up the project (Chapter 6), entering project tasks (Chapter 7), and scheduling and linking tasks (Chapter 8). By the time you finish with these basic activities, you have a solid, workable plan to serve as an excellent management tool as the project progresses. If this is all you need for the project you are managing, you can skip Chapters 9 and 10, and move right on to Chapter 11; however, if your responsibility extends to managing the people, materials, and costs relating to a project, scheduling their time, and making sure the project stays within budget, you’ve come to the right place.

In this chapter, we’ll discuss how to define project resources and costs. Here’s what we’ll cover:

• Estimating resource requirements

• Entering resource requirements

• Setting working times for resources

• Entering cost information

Effective scheduling of complex resources is what makes Microsoft Project more than a glorified spreadsheet. Project is not just a tool for listing tasks and entering dates—you can do that in Microsoft Outlook or even Excel. Project’s real power comes in the scheduling engine that runs behind the scenes, helping you to take complex information and crunch it down into a realistic road map for project success. Project not only schedules tasks, but it schedules the full range of resources needed to complete a project: individuals, teams, facilities, equipment, supplies, and materials.

Before you can successfully use Project to create a final project schedule, you must understand Project’s scheduling rules, why it schedules the way it does, and what it all means to your project. Resource scheduling in Project is not an area where you want to experiment unaware—unless, that is, you want to waste valuable time and end up with a project plan that doesn’t work. After you understand the concepts behind the tools and why Project behaves the way it does, you can replace a lack of knowledge with confidence as you successfully schedule a project’s resources.