Hi,

I’ve got very good question from one of my Blog readers:

“Hi,
I am a novice. Tried to find some solution to a certain scenario in your blogs but browsing through some dozen articles, I thought it better to ask you. Apologies for your inconvenience.
Scenario:
A task naming “Walkway” constitutes 100 ft walkway with 4 days “Work”. Resources are assigned such as
1. [Name] Construction team, [Type] Work, [Unit] 100%, [Work] 8x4days-32 hrs
2. [Name] Pavers, [Type] Material, [Work] 500 Sft
Is there some way that if scope is changed to 200 (100×2) ft walkway, the [Work] for both type of resources automatically changes respective to the task I.e. Construction team [Work] 64 hrs (32×2) and Pavers [Work] 1000 Sft (500 x 2).
Best regards”

OK! I will try to explain this using Microsoft Project 2016!

First I will create the Project with Task – Walkway, and with 4 Days Duration:

and I will create Resources:

• Construction Team – Work
• Pavers – Material
• Asphalt – Material

I added Asphalt, because I will need it for explanation. Paver is, according to Wikipedia: “A paver (paver finisher, asphalt finisher, paving machine) is a piece of construction equipment used to lay asphalt on roads, bridges, parking lots and other such places.” So, it is machine.

Now I will assign resources according to the example above, and I will also assign 500 for Asphalt:

‚

and I will get:

As you can see, I added Work field in Gantt Chart View.

Now I will change Work from 32 to 64 hours and I will get:

As you can see, Asphalt and Paver is unchanged (quantity remains 500). Why is that? It is because MS Project will treat Material Resources as they should be treated. When work in hours for Work resources is increased, it does not mean that more material is needed for the Task. For example, if you build a wall, and you need 1000 bricks for it, and 100 hours, if you find out that you need 30 more hours it does not automatically mean that since you need more time you need more material.

BUT! If you know that you will spend exact amount of Material per some time (like per hour), than you can do that. Let’s say that we found out that we have to build twice larger Walkway. And that we know that Pavers can do 15.625 square feet per hour. In that case I we should assign Resources like this:

Notice, that MS Project rounded Units for Pavers to 15,56e per hour. Now we get this (in Resource Usage View):

As you can see Quantity for Pavers is 500,16, which is 15,63 (per hour) * 32 (hours) = 500,16

Now if We change work from 32 to 64 hours, as we did before (I will not show you this picture again), we will get (now I will use Task Usage View):

As you can see, Quantity for Pavers is now 1.000,32 which is 15,63 (per hour) * 64 (hours) = 1.000,32, but quantity for Asphalt remains the same. So in this particular example if we know that we are going to spend quantity of 1.000 of Asphalt we should change it manually.

Hope this helps.