Tracking Work v's actual work - why is it not working?

[BTuffery]

Hi, Can anyone help me - Microsoft Project is causing me grief!

I am trying to plan and track the workload of a number of small
projects and the time of around 30 people. I want to run the project using hours so that planned time
can be compared to subsequent weekly timesheet information.

Each project that comes in is broken down into phases - Phase 00 - Phase 10
although not all phases apply to each project. So, for example when I
am planning time I use the task or resource view:
M T W
- Fred Smith (Resource) Work (Total) 8 8 8
Act. Work (Total) 8 8 8
Project 1 Work (Total)
Act. Work (Total)
Phase 00a Work(predict@start)8 8 8
Act Work 4
Phase 00b Work
Act. Work 2 4
Phase 05c Work
Act Work 2 8 4


The above is how it should look - however when I go to enter the
hours in actual time it automatically adds the same figure to the work
box knocking the total time for the day over 8 hours.

How can I stop this happening? I have saved my baseline and turned off
all the calculation functions in tools/options. I am using Project
2002.

Thanks in advance, Beth

 

[BTuffery]

Problem Solved - Work and Actual work are essentially the same thing. The view that is needed for the comparision between planned time and actual time is "baseline work" which you can view after saving your baseline and right clicking on details - detail styles.

 

[PDQBach]

Work and Actual Work are most definitely NOT "essentially the same thing".

Work is the estimation of how much work will be required.

Baseline Work is a historical moment in time when you saved what your estimate was.

Actual Work is what actually happened.

1. Last month you estimated that it would take 2 days to do a task.

2. You baselined your project.

3. You realized that your estimate was low so you increased Work to 3 days.

4. Somebody provided the deliverable and it took four days of work to do that.

After step 1:
Work: 2 days; Baseline: NA; Actual: NA

After step 2:
Work: 2 days; Baseline: 2 days; Actual: NA

After step 3:
Work: 3 days; Baseline: 2 days; Actual: NA

After step 4:
Work: 4 days; Baseline 2 days; Actual 4 days.

 

[BTuffery]

But if Work and Actual work become the same amount what is the point of recording actual work? why not just overwrite work? Step 3 doesn't really apply in my case all i need to record is what was planned and what happened. i want to keep my historic data seperate from the current data for a true comparision that i can view graphically in the tracking Gantt.

 

[PDQBach]

In your particular case Baseline Start/Finish and Actual Start/Finish meet your requirements.

For the rest of us, estimates regularly change and are tracked by a variety of means including regular updating of Work. A lot of effort is put in to avoid the variance in step 4 so the "auto-update" of the Work estimate by the Actual Work doesn't happen. I was trying, as best as I could, to show your environment's work sequence so you could see how the fields relate to each other.