Question

Cost Loading Protocols

For most of our projects, we are not interested in dealing with resources that are specific people, but instead, just assigning a cost and total man hours to an activity (IE no units or specific people, just cost and hours). I know I am able to add an expense to an activity to get the cost associated, however, we like the flexibility of the resource to manually assign more per month in the assignments window.

My question is- how are other people assigning costs for projects where the specifics of who is doing the work and the units are not important, simply that we can have a cash and hour projection.

The best way I have found to date is to have a cost resource for each job as well as a manhour resource for each job. I put the cost at $1/unit and the man hours at $0/hr so that I am able to generate each curve. Any thoughts on this subject?

Answer 1

That's about the simplest means to accomplish your goal from within the P6 software tool. Some would argue that you could also just use a spreadsheet, but you'll lose out on the time-based aspects of what P6 calculates (calendars, availabilities, etc...). Load the resources, generate the dollars and hours curves in P6, and then export that data to Excel and do what you may with it, if that's one of your goals.