Table of contents
- Overview
- What is a Planning tab in a project profile?
- Project Planning tab with finance access enabled and correlation between estimations and plans
- FAQ
- Summary
Overview
In this lesson, you will learn how to deal with the Planning tab in the Project profile.
This lesson is an extension for Lesson 7 - Adding a new project and quick Project Page overview, Lesson 8 - Project estimations and roles, and Lesson 10 - Assignment types and assigning people to project.
If you are still getting familiar with the above one - I would like you to start with the lessons I've shared above, which will give you a basic understanding of the matter.
What is a Planning tab in a project profile?
The planning tab is your command center of project planning and lets you:
- create project estimations,
- create project phases,
- schedule people,
- compare your plans to estimates,
- seeing the financial progress of the project.
What is the difference between plans and estimations in Primetric?
Estimations are related to project work and can be made without assigning particular people to the project. On the other hand, plans are made based on scheduling and project budget plans.
Here is an example of estimations:
Here is an example of work plans:
Project Planning tab with finance access enabled and correlation between estimations and plans
In Lesson 11, we explained how financial access can affect the overall view and access to finance in a project for a manager. So, it is time to understand how estimations and planning correlate in the project planning tab.
Let's establish a starting point. You already know how to:
- assign people to a project,
- and create estimations.
But you probably need to learn the correlation at a single project level. So, let's go deep into that.
Summary section - Estimations vs Plans
1st step: Estimation creation
First, after estimation creation, you can notice that the Summary has changed, and an initial chart shows your estimations.
Before estimation creation
After estimation creation
As you can see, the charts have been updated after adding estimations to your project. You can see that in the Time & Work chart, are 2,450 hours estimated, and 2,450 are not scheduled. It means you still need to assign people to the project/phase.
The same goes for the work budget, which shows you the estimated income, expenses, and profit.
2nd step: Assignment creation
When you assign people to projects and set utilization levels and hourly rates, you will be able to see how schedulings relate to estimations.
After assignments creation
Now, you can see that next to the estimated work, there is scheduled work. What's more, Primetric automatically shows you if you scheduled more or fewer hours than you estimated.
The same goes with the Budget chart, where you can spot scheduled income (in an organization and client's currency), scheduled expenses and profit.
3rd step: Filtering data based on project phases
Ok, now you are armed with estimations, assignments, and charts that are helpful in quick comparison. What if you want to analyze only a specific project phase? It's just as simple as that.
4th step: Tracking time and comparing it to scheduled and estimated work
When everything is set (besides the Budget plan, which will be explored in Lesson 14), your people can start tracking time so you can see the last layer of data in the Summary section.
Now, you can see work logged and compare it to the scheduled and estimated data. Voila!
People section - see resources assigned to the project
In this section, I will show you the most important information about assignments and people working on a project.
Details - show you basic information about people, e.g., position, team, seniority, tech skills, etc.
Budget - show you information about finances related to assignments
A - allows you to hide/show information about people and finances
B - you can see a comparison between total scheduled and total tracked hours
C - total average hour cost of this person
D - here you can set the default project hour rate for this person (helpful when there are managers that schedule people without finance access)
E - person details
F - you can see a comparison between scheduled and tracked hours in a specific assignment
G - finance details of the assignment
Reports section - see summary report in comparison to finance report
On the right side of the Planning tab, you can see a summary section in comparison to finance reports. It gives you a quick overview of the estimation and profitability of the whole project.
More about the Financial Project report you will find in the next lessons.
FAQ
How average hour cost is calculated for a specific assignment?
If it is a contractor:
You can set hourly cost directly in the assignment creation form.
If it is an employee:
Average hour cost is calculated based on a monthly salary and scheduled hours during assignment duration.
Example:
Bob is a full-time employee. In May you scheduled him for 162h. His monthly salary is 5000$. So, the average hour cost is: 5000$ / 162h = 30,86 $ per hour.
How total average hour cost is calculated for a specific person?
The only difference between the total average hour cost and the average hourly cost is that the first one is calculated based on the total number of scheduled hours - not a particular assignment.
How work income scheduled is calculated?
Scheduled work income = number of scheduled hours * hour rate for your client
How work cost scheduled is calculated?
Scheduled work cost = number of scheduled hours * average hour cost in the selected period
Calculating average hour cost. Why do we need this data?
Looking broadly at the issues of budget planning and its estimation, which was discussed in previous lessons, it is worth pointing to some details, such as the average hourly cost of an employee. Why do we need such information, and why is it worth focusing on it momentarily?
The hourly cost of an employee will be determined in advance when we settle with him on a contractor basis and when we have his hourly rate entered. An employee's average hourly cost will be the difference between the monthly rate and the number of hours assigned to the project in a given month.
The cost of an employee per hour in the project allows us to determine whether we can afford to use it or maybe we need to replace it with someone with similar skills but at a lower cost. Moreover, it allows us to plan the hourly price of an employee working on a project. All these influence factors, such as the planned total costs of the employee and planned income, are shown in the following employee assignment to the project.
Summary
To summarize, good project planning with assigning employees is more than just planning their hours in the project or allocating the right people with the right skills. It also allows you to estimate the budget reasonably through almost surgical management, thanks to considering, e.g., average hour cost. You can change many of these coordinates in the project dashboard.
Here, we also have a relatively broad overview of the project's assigned hours and budget as long as you give your manager access to full financial options. however, even if you do not, it can still estimate the time allocation in the project or specific phases.