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Productivity and Resource assignment..

2 replies [Last post]
Thomas Chua
User offline. Last seen 14 years 16 weeks ago. Offline
Joined: 23 Mar 2008
Posts: 5
i am rather new to ms project. have a few questions here. when i hv created the wbs, i give them a period each. then i assign the resources to them. when, for a specific task, i assign more resources, the time changed, it reduced. Nothing wrong with that as more resources means less time. however, each activities r of different productivity. and the time that i hv entered is based on the no. of people for that job and the amount of time required by that amount of people.

Say welding a section of plate, i put 2 welders and total required time is say 2 hours. what should i do then? i can’t seem to find a place to input productivity for each activity in MSP. please advise, thanks.

Replies

Bo Johnsen
User offline. Last seen 8 years 24 weeks ago. Offline
Joined: 28 Feb 2006
Posts: 119
Well, MS Project does work with productivities to a certain degree, but you have to do a bit of customized fields before it works in a simple way, so admitted it is maybe not as clever carried out as in SpiderProject (not that I know it) and in other planning software that have this features.

Anyway, in MS Project you can introduce e.g. a Number1 column containing your quantities, Number2 contains your resource productivities and Duration1 the product of Number1 and Number2. Duration1 maybe need some touching up with INT()functions and a factor depending of what unit (hours, days, etc.) you calculate in. Then copy by paste special / paste links from Duration1 into Duration.

Now all durations will change when you change quantities and resource productivities and actvities will move acoording to their links.

You could also introduce a Number3 column containing your buffer/contingency/safety time for each activity, e.g. 5% extra for time to this activity and 10% to this activity, before calculating Duration1 and pasting links into Duration.

Regards,

Bo

MS Project does not work with productivities.
I recommend to look at Spider Project http://www.spiderproject.ru/demo_e.php
In Spider Project you can define the quantities of work to be done (work volumes) and assigned resource productivities. The rest will be done by the software.
You can also create the database of resource productivities on typical assignments and use this database in your projects. In this case it will not be necessary to enter resource productivities for the repeated types of work.