Microsoft Project 2013: The Missing Manual

Understanding Project’s Resource Types

Microsoft Project offers three types of resources for projects, each with its own purpose and idiosyncrasies. Here are the various types, what each one represents, and how it can affect your project (the box on How Resources Affect Project Schedules describes different ways resources of all types can affect projects):

• Work. Time is what distinguishes work resources from other resource types in Project. For example, people and equipment are work resources, because you track their participation by the amount of time they spend on the project. Whether you’re assigning people to direct traffic or renting equipment for an event, your project’s tasks depend on when those work resources are available, how much time they have, and how much they cost for a period of time, as shown in Figure 8-2.

  Tip

  Because you usually don’t want people’s salaries in the public eye, you can fill in pay rates with the averaged burdened cost (an employee’s hourly wages or salary, plus benefits, taxes, equipment, and so on, which you can get from your HR department) for someone in a given role.

  

  Figure 8-2. Fields in Project’s Resource Sheet view (page 205) may be blank or contain different kinds of information depending on the type of resource. For example, a work resource doesn’t have a Material label, and costs are calculated initially as dollars per hour. Material resources ...