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.
