weightages to actvities

I want to know what these "weightages" are.
How are they derived and applied?
What are they applied to?
What do they mean?
What is the purpose?
Can you give a simple example?

Re "S" Curve, this is a graph of something on one axis against something else on another axis.
What are these axes?

In MSP it is a simple matter to use the analysis toolbar to export cumulative cost or cumulative Work (man-hours) to EXCEL and graph them. Both are usually "S" shaped.

As i know, there’s no such a option for your weightages.
May be you can try using number fields and formula to calculate what you want.

For S curve, suppose you mean ACWP,BCWP, BCWS... against time, I ’d like to export to Excel.

you must first save a baseline then you can have the planned value, or make a copy of your schedule and keep it without any progress,then export to excel, that is your planned value

My problem is to frame the target ’S’ Curve. How can we build it...? If we update a large project with time and plot these % progress values, we are getting a ’S’ curve.

a) However ms-project is giving equal importance to all activites which cannot be possible in reality. For example for a certain structure earthwork may be huge quantity and it takes lot of time but it may be less imp from the project point of view.

b) Moreover if 100% of a concrete work has to be done in 100 days, project assumes that per day 1% work has to be done...however in reality, mobilization of a batching plant begins initially, slowly the work rate increases and reaches peak and comes...

so even if i calculate % progress from the already prepared schedules also it may not be a correct value....that is why i want to know a method of setting a target ’s’ curve.

Than you should load the schedule with resources and a rate for each resource. (Assign resources to tasks only!)

The next step is then to adjust the resource curves (called work contour in MSP) for each assignment, to match the actual load across each activity duration.

This solves the problem (a) with the ’weight’ of an activity and also adjusts the BCWS and BCWP across time. In other words: a 25% complete on a front loaded activity represents more than 25% of the work. (your point b)

Please note there is a bug in the way MSP calculates BCWP! (it incorrectly uses the status date, so any work completed ahead of both baseline start date and status date, does not receive any BCWP)

Hope this helps,

Niek.

I dont know the resources associated with each of activities...since its an EPC contract...designs are released progressively and exact quantities reqd are not known...however before all this happens i hav to fix a target..
For Ex: take a water treatment plant. it has civil works, mechanical equipments, structural works and other pipe networks...i know the time allocated for each of the work and the cost associated and so i can calculate the progress with time manually...but imagine there are 50 varieties of such plants and how can i keep track of all of them...so frm the schedule itself i shud be able to calculate the progress values...however i am getting this problem of different weightages..

but as you said..probably instead of putting resources...putting the cost of items may solve my problem...but thats a laborious task since i dont know the cost of each of item..in two thousand activities....and also suppose we say the cost of a machine is 3000$, we shud clearly know wether it includes erection costs as well..and the project has probably thousands of mechanical equipments.

can u explain me something abt those work contours or some weblink related to it?

This is the classical problem between the amount of detail you can manage and the amount of detailed information you require. If you want to perform (detailed) calculations in MS Project you’ll have to provide it the (detailed) information it requires, I’m afraid.

Adjusting the ’weight’ of activities can best be done by converting all resources (i.e. people, equipment, material) into one single currency. Just adding costs probably won’t work because your resources may have very different rates and as you say they are not equally spread across the duration.

Work contour is in the MSP help file, I don’t know of any other pointers.

H.T.H.

Here is a solution i follows

I Have Bars For Only Major Activities
Say : Foundation Work

And In MS excel
All Activities to be finished is listed and ,given weightage according to the work involved
so the sum of total weihgtage is "100"
Example:For This Foundation Work
Excavation-30
Concrete-60
Backfill-10

Now

If Excavation is 50% Completed, The Overall %Completed Is 15%

This Is Put In to the Program (MSP Or P3) And
Updated Plan Is Generated.