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 not familiar with the above one - I strongly encourage you to start with the above lessons, 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 financial progress of the project.
What is the difference between plans and estimations in Primetric?
Estimations are related to project work and can be roughly made without assigning any particular people to the project. On the other hand, plans are made based on schedulings 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, now it is time to understand how estimations and planning are correlated in the project planning tab.
Let's establish a starting point. You already know how to:
- assign people in a project,
- and create estimations.
But what you probably don't know what is the correlation at a single project level. So, let's go deep into that.
Summary section - Estimations vs Plans
1st step: Estimation creation
First of all, after estimation creation, you can notice that the Summary has changed and there is an initial chart showing your estimations.
Before estimation creation
After estimation creation
As you can see after adding estimations to your project charts has been updated. Now, you can see that in Time & Work chart there is 2450h estimated and 2450 not scheduled. It means that you didn't assign any people to project / phase yet.
The same goes with Work Budget which shows you that there is estimated income, expenses, and profit.
2nd step: Assignment creation
When you assign people to project, set utilization level, hour rates you will be able to see how schedulings relate to estimations.
After assignments creation
Now, you can see that next to estimated work there is scheduled work. What's more Primetric automatically shows you if you scheduled more or less hours than you estimated.
The same goes with the Budget chart, where you can spot scheduled income (in organization and client's currency), as well as 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 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 as well, and compare it to scheduled and estimated one. Voila!
People section - see resources assigned to project
In this section, I will show you the most important information related to 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 of time
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 for a moment?
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. When it is an employee, the 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 in the project, or maybe we need to replace it with someone with similar skills but at a lower cost. Moreover, it allows us to plan the price per hour of an employee working on a given project. All these influence such factors as planned total costs of the employee and planned income, which is shown in the following assignment of the employee to the project.
Summary
To summarize, good project planning with assigning employees is not only a matter of planning their hours in the project or allocating the right people with the right skills. It also allows you to estimate the budget well through almost surgical management, thanks to taking into account e.g. avg hour cost. You can change many of these coordinates in the project dashboard.
It is worth pointing out that here we also have a fairly broad overview of both the assigned hours in the project and its budget. As long as you give your manager access to full financial options, of course. however, even if you do not, it can still estimate the time allocation in the project or in specific phases.
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