Deb, are you OK?
Yes, better than ever, and thanks for asking. I really really like this software and really really recommend it. No I wasn't paid to say this and I'm not under any threat here. :) Now I read part of the instruction book and skimmed the rest, so you may know more about Project than I do. :) But if you know nothing, hopefully this will inspire you to check it out.
What's the big deal then?
Project has an Excel-like interface, so the learning curve is small. You can use all kinds of different views and charts to plan out any project. In most of the views, each row represents a task or a task's subtask. You can designate the amount of time it'll take, the number of work hours that'll go in during that time (say 40 hours over 2 weeks if you're balancing with other project or just not working on this one full time). You then create "resources," which for people in our business is just PEOPLE. We don't have to balance jackhammer usage among teams or cement mixer rental for a task. We're just using PEOPLE. Project lets us put in each person, the hours they tend to work, and then we can "assign" them to various tasks.
What confused me, and thanks to a nice guy in the newsgroup [microsoft.public.project] it was all cleared up, was assigning percentages of people. That was very abstract for my kind of thinking and took a few days to sink in. Here's how that works. If Jim normally works a 40 hour week for you, and he's going to work 20 hours a week on this project, and this project needs 40 hours of work, then over 2 weeks, Jim is assigned at 50%. Trust me, it works. :) Another thing that messed me up was that when it calculated the "duration," it's doing it in workdays. So we may need 4 weeks to do a project, but it's showing 20 days (and 4 weeks of course is 28 days), so that threw me off a bit at first.
When you set up a resource, you can set up various flat fees or rates for that resource. So I can say my programmers are paid $X/hour. Then when I say this task needs 40 hours, it automatically calculated the right cost in the cost field. HOWEVER, I don't know about you, but I mark up what my programmers charge so I don't want potential clients to see THAT cost. To fix that up, I took one of the views, showed the usual fields like name, duration, work hours, start date, finish date, and cost1 (which I named cost). Cost1 is a custom field where I put in the real cost I was charging the client for that task. This seems like the best way to enter that if you want to use another view to compare your cost to what you're charging. However, what I ended up doing when I realised I didn't care that much was that I CHANGED the rate I had set up for the resource I was using to the marked up hourly rate. That way, in the regular "cost" field, Project correctly calculated what I was charging the client (not what I was paying the programmer). Yes it's a bit twisty turny, but it all made sense!
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