Category: Microsoft Project

Material resource: A non-human, quantifyable substance assigned to project tasks.

Material resources are assigned to project tasks, but are not human resources.  They are any quantifyable material used to complete the task.  The image below illustrates.  In this example, 40 yards of sod are used in completing the “Lay sod” task.

–newshirt

What’s the difference between MS Project ‘Duration’ and ‘Work’ fields?  The image below probably explains it all.  It’s a simple task from Microsoft Project that shows both the ‘Duration’ and ‘Work’ columns.

 

 

As you can see ‘Duration’ defines the calendar time that the task will be worked on, while ‘Work’ defines the number of man-hours.  In this case, Frank is scheduled to work only 40 hours over the next four weeks.  That’s only 25% of his scheduled hours.