Project Baseline Guidance

[melissacooney]

Please help me understand where this is pulling from? I'm a Project Manager, so I have no back-end way to view things. In the baseline view there is Planned Operating - which matches my Resource Internal Opex cost plan, but what is the "Planned Cost" (highlighted in pic attached - I'm currently in the "Current" column of the baseline. I can't make any of my resource  costs add up to this amount. Resource assignments do not show rates, but when I calculated them using the blended rate, they add up to the Planned Operating. 

[Paula O]

Hiya - some things you might need to check:

- is the project attached to a rate model so the calculations could roll up correctly from the resource plans to project?

- have you tried to do the calculation based on default resource rate of $50/hr to see if it might match to Planned Cost?

- the blended rate used for all resource plans - has any of them fallen to the cracks, as in is there a Group or Resource Role or user who might not have one and it would default to the $50/hr?

- are all resourcing related Cost Plans against the correct cost type, i.e. Capex/Opex?

The below is from my PDI - the HR Specialists are against a rate of $120/hr and their Planned cost adds up correctly, however the other 2 don't have a blended rate so the system used the $50/hr

Also, when I confirmed the Resource Plan, the planned cost does reflect the blended rate, but the confirmed cost, doesn't and this is because my project is not linked to a Rate model so the calculations are skewed

Hope this helps a bit in your investigation.

Without seeing the Resource Plans/Assignments and Cost Plans it's difficult to determine what's being taken in consideration for the actual calculation. In principle it should show all the resource planned cost, regardless if it's Opex or Capex but as it's less than Planned Operating which as per your message would be just from resourcing costs, it's a bit odd and hard to investigate without more info.

As an end note, I know you're using the new Resource Assignment and I kept referring to Resource Plan which is the old resourcing way to do things but RAs have in the backend RPs so for  cost investigation purposes it should be similar 🙂

[melissacooney]

Thank you, Paula! I checked and we do NOT use the Rate Model on our projects, they are all blank. I was not aware of the default rate of $50, so that is something I will dig into further. As far as cost plans, since we are using Resource Assignments now, it just generates one single internal cost plan of all the costs rolled into one as Internal Opex (Labor Opex type). That is why I was hoping to see each RA cost somewhere. Now I can go in and click the backend RP for each person and collect that way, but it is time consuming and still does not help with the rates honestly. However, I did get an answer to a different question that will allow for us to add the "Planned Cost" and "Confirmed/Allocated Costs" to our RAs similar to how we could view them in the RPs, which will mean not clicking into every single RA, then to the RPs which will save some time. I just need to find out where the discrepancies are, my guess is t may be that default rate. I appreciate your response so much!