Future period bucket planning

When you specify an activity's total budgeted or planned units, the budgeted or planned units for an assignment to that activity are spread evenly across the duration of the activity, in the timescale increment you choose. For example, a four-week activity with 80 budgeted or planned units is spread as follows, assuming a weekly timescale:

However, your projects may contain activities for which you know work will be performed sporadically and at varying levels of effort. For these activities, you can do either of the following to more accurately capture when you plan for work to be performed on an activity:

• Assign a curve to a resource or role assignment.
• Manually enter future period assignment values.

While assigning a resource curve to the resource/role assignment will yield more accurate results than spreading units evenly across the duration of an activity, the work you plan to perform per period on an activity may not be fully reflected by the curve. As a result, performance against the project plan cannot be accurately measured.

To achieve the most precise resource/role distribution plan, you can manually enter the budgeted or planned resource/role allocation per assignment in the timescale unit you choose (days, weeks, months, quarters, years, or financial periods). For example, assume an activity has an original or planned duration of 28 days and budgeted or planned units of 80 hours. For this activity, you know that the actual work will not be spread evenly across the duration of the activity; rather, the budgeted or planned units will be spread as follows:

By manually entering the planned resource/role distribution in future period assignment buckets, you can create an accurate baseline plan to measure against current project progress. As the current project schedule progresses and you apply actuals, you can track how the project is performing against plan by comparing the project’s budgeted or planned future periods to the current project’s actuals.

If work on an activity is not proceeding according to plan, you can manually update the remaining units for an assignment's future periods, enabling you to measure the remaining work for an assignment without changing the original plan. Alternatively, if you choose to re-estimate future work based on changes to the project schedule, you can edit an assignment's future period budgeted or planned units
while the activity is in progress; if many assignment's require re-estimation, you can establish a new baseline plan based on your changes.

Tips

• You can compare the planned future period resource distribution to actual units and costs in the Resource Usage Profile, Resource Usage Spreadsheet, Activity Usage Profile, Activity Usage Spreadsheet, time-distributed reports, and the Tracking window. If you plan your project work in defined financial periods, after you store period performance, you can compare the resource distribution you planned to the project's past period actuals.
• Activity costs, including earned value and planned value, are calculated using the planned future period resource distribution you define for activity assignments.

Note

• You must have the 'Edit Future Periods' project privilege to manually enter future period data.

Related Topics

Assign a curve to a resource or role assignment

Manually enter future period assignment values

Store Period Performance