Dear all,

I would like you to comment on my approach for overtime planning.

Say I plan a project, and I know that to do certain activity I would need 2 engineers for 2 weeks.

The type of business we are in, is that we work in weeks blocks, and I know in advance how long we will be working and how many people will be assigned to do a job. (e.g. to make a baby I would assign 1 woman for 9 months)

I also know that statistically engineers always report in average 50 hours a week instead of normal 40. The normal way would be to assign resource for 2*50/40=250%. Say Engineer[250%]. However there are 2 problems:

• If I assign Engineer[500%], then it is not clear whether I planned 5 people for this task or 4 people, but working overtime (all our tasks are not effort driven)
• If statistics changes, and it appears, that engineers actually require less hours overtime, I would have to go and adjust all assignments in a schedule.

What I do: I create an effective hourly rate, which takes into account statistical overtime of people and their hourly rate. So, for Engineers I increate rate by 50/40=1.25 coefficient. However for those who always report 40h in average (some people are not allowed to report overtime), I use their normal rate. Advantage is that when I assign for a task Engineer[500%] it is clear for everybody I need 5 warm bodies. The disadvantages are:

• It is a bit confusing to explain to management
• The actual extract from time reporting system, would be different in man*h from what I predicted (the cost shall be correct though). So, I would have to take “Work” value from MS Project and adjust it by my overtime coefficient,  to show what will be extracted from time reporting system.

Any ideas on how it can be improved?