Adding Resources to a Project Using the Resource Sheet in Microsoft Project 2016
During this Microsoft Project 2016 training tutorial video, we will talk about resources such as the people, equipment and materials used in a project. These resources can be classified into Work, Material and Cost. We will show you how some functions in Project 2016 work, including Resource Sheet, Gantt Chart View and Team Planner View. We will also walk you through the process of filling up the Resource Sheet.
Welcome back to our course on Project 2016.
In this section we’re going to start to look at Resources. Resources include the people involved in a project, they include equipment and materials used, and various other types of resource, notably cost associated with a project. When you look at a Gantt Chart such as this one you’re primarily looking at tasks. The table on the left gives information about the tasks and the chart on the right gives a pictorial, a graphical representation of the scheduling of the tasks, their durations, dependencies, and so on.
Now tasks and resources are basically the two building blocks of a project in Microsoft Project 2016. And we link the two together using what are called Assignments or Resource Assignments. In this section we’re going to look at Resources and in the next section we’re going to look at Resource Assignments.
One thing that you may have noticed when we were using the View Tab before is that the first two groups on the left are Task Views and Resource Views. And largely speaking when we’re looking at a project we tend to be looking at tasks or at resources. But there are many views that enable us to look at both. And in particular to look at the relationship between them. Usually so far when we’ve been looking at tasks we’ve used Gantt Chart View.
And for most people that is the view that they use most of the time. Of the Resource Views a very popular view is Resource Sheet View. And that’s the one that we’re going to look at first. So if I click on Resource Sheet, this spreadsheet gives us information about all of the resources in our project. And at the moment as you can see we have no resources in our project.
Now we’re going to start to add some resources in just a moment. But before we do just look down at the right hand end of the Status Bar. Two of the main icons there are on the left here the button to take us to Gantt Chart View and three to the right, the one that looks just like a spreadsheet, that one takes us back to Resource Sheet View. So you’ll probably get used to switching between those two. The two views between them are also very commonly used. Task Usage which basically lists tasks and shows which resources are used in a task.
And at the moment we have no resources so there’s nothing being used. And the next one is Team Planner View which can enable us to look at how the work on a project is distributed between a team. Now at the moment we have no team because we have no resources to put into a team. So let’s go back to Resource Sheet View.
The two main projects that I’m using on this course differ in many ways. And perhaps the biggest difference is in the resources that they use and the way that they use those resources.
In the case of a wedding some of the people resources involved which would, for example be the bride and groom, won’t be charging for their time. And also the wedding won’t involve using lots of consumable materials, not in any case in the way that a building project, a bathroom refit project would use materials such as paint and floor tiles and that kind of thing.
The difference is going to be even bigger when we start looking at costs because when it comes to cost, for example, the bride and groom wouldn’t expect to charge their time on this project to people whereas the people working on the bathroom refit will be charging their time to whoever is paying for the bathroom refit. So there are many differences between these two projects in relation to how they handle resources and the associated costs. But I hope that by dealing with two such different projects we’re going to deal with many of the situations that you’re likely to come across in future when using Project 2016.
As we add resources to the Resource Sheet each row on the sheet represents a resource. And each column represents a property of that resource. The first resource that I’m going to add to this project is the bride. And first of all I need to say what type of resource the bride is. There are basically three choices, work, material, and cost. And as we’re going to see this is not always a particularly easy choice to make. Generally speaking people are entered onto the resource sheet as work resources because they do work.
And whether or not they charge for that work is a separate matter. But we expect them to perform tasks and complete work rather than as in the case of say materials be consumed by a job, used up in doing a particular task. Or a cost where we basically say with a task that it has a certain cost but isn’t necessarily performed by an individual or involve the consumption of some kind of material. Now we’re going to see examples of each of these three resource types but we’re going to work for the moment on the principle that when we add people we’re adding work resources generally.
Now when I choose a type for a resource I will get a different accessible selection of properties here. So for instance, when I declare that a particular resource is a work resource I can specify their standard rate. And the standard rate here is $0 per hour. And I can specify their overtime rate. Now as I mentioned just now the bride is not going to be charging for her time on this project so we don’t need to assign a standard rate or overtime rate for the bride. We do however need to declare how many brides we have.
And we only have one and she is represented by 100%. If I were dealing with say bricklayers and I was building a house I might say I’ve got three bricklayers, so that’s 300%, and I could say the standard rate that it costs me to employ those bricklayers and then I can also enter an overtime rate. I also have here a cost per use. So if a particular resource has cost per use. So for example, if I’m dealing with something where there’s a setup fee, perhaps a delivery fee or a contract fee or a hiring fee or something, a one-off cost I can specify that here.
And I will normally also specify an accrual method. Now for the moment I want you to ignore accrual and I also want you to ignore the next column which is the calendar that this particular resource uses, which by default is our standard base calendar. Now we’re not looking at calendars at the moment so just ignore both accrue and base.
Now when it comes to using any resource on a project it’s always a good idea to give that resource initials whereby we can identify that resource, for example, on a Gantt Chart. So for the bride I’m literally just going to put Bride as the initials. So that’s my first resource setup.
Now it would only seem right to add the groom as my second resource. So my project now has two resources.
The next resource I’m going to setup is a little bit controversial really. I’m not really sure you do it this way but you certainly could do it this way. And I’m going to add a resource, wedding ring. And I’m going to say that it is a material resource. You could actually work it that way.
It may seem a little bit heartless in a way but let’s call it a material resource. And I’m going to give it an initials of Ring. And note that when I chose material some of the other fields, some of the other properties changed. So for instance Max was cleared out. It no longer said 100%, the default for a work resource because we’re not talking about having a maximum number of rings.
We can basically buy as many rings as we want, subject to available funds of course. And similarly the standard rate changed from being dollars per hour to just dollars because we’re not talking about a rate of pay for somebody for a work resource, a person. We’re talking about the cost of a material. When you’re dealing with cost for materials you also declare what units the cost refers to.
So if instead of wedding rings I was dealing with building bricks I might record a cost here for 1,000 bricks. And what I would put here in the material column might well be 1,000 for 1,000 bricks. For the price for a ring will be a price per ring. And let’s suppose that the price I’m working on here is $500 per ring. And that is all the information I need to setup that material resource. So at whatever point I decide to buy one or more wedding rings in my project the cost will be recorded in the project as $500 per ring.
Now for an example of a cost resource. And it’s going to seem now as though I’m disagreeing with what I said earlier in this section. Sometimes a person working on a project is not really working on it as though they were say a builder or in this case the bride or groom, somebody who’s directly involved in a number of tasks on the project. What they are doing is more of if you like a service.
So I might choose to make the photographer or videographer for this project a service, a cost to the project. We’re not talking about paying this person by the hour. We’re talking about their standard charge for photographing or videoing a wedding. So in this case I’m going to add a resource Photographer and not deal with the photographer as though he or she is a person working on the project but deal with them as a service to the project, a cost to the project. So on this occasion I’m going to make the type cost.
The initials I’m going to apply are Photo. Now you notice there that there is no highlighted cost rate field with dollars, 0.00, whatever as we had before for work or material resources. And in fact the best way to record the cost of a cost resource in a particular situation is to assign that cost when you assign the resource to the task. And I’m going to show you how to do that a little bit later on. At the moment the important thing is that we have listed our cost resource here, photographer, and of course with this project there will be many other cost resources.
It’s true to say in this particular case that many of the resources, things like wedding dress and even wedding ring might reasonably be considered to be costs rather than materials. But as I said earlier on in this section sometimes it’s actually quite a difficult decision to make and you’ll certainly find that you have your own approach to determining which is the best way of dealing with resources on your own projects.
Having setup a few resources there we’re going to do a little bit of resource assignment in the next section. But there’s one more thing to show you in this section. If I select one of the resources note that there is a Resource Tab. And one of the options on the Resource Tab is Information and that brings up the Resource Information dialogue which is a direct parallel to the Task Information dialogue, except of course this one relates to resources.
As with the Task Information dialogue you have a number of tabs and these tabs have already got the information we’ve entered so far on. But of course there’s other information that you can add, some of which we’ll be looking at a little bit later on in the course.
There are of course other ways of getting at this Resource Information. You can right click and there is an Information option on the contextual menu. And of course just double clicking on a resource brings up the Resource Information dialogue as well.
That’s it for Resources for the moment. I’ll see you in the next section.
Simon Calder
Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA. He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!
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