Projects
The project page is for managing projects including their tasks and actuals. It is also used to perform forward-scheduling and for assigning RSEs as resources to tasks within a project.
There are three different monetary fields associated with a project.
The Budget is the amount of money the PI has available as agreed in the request document and on the demand card. The Planned Cost is how much the project is expected to cost based on the scheduled tasks and the day rate of the resources assigned to complete those tasks. The Actual Cost is the amount the project has cost the RSE department to date based on the number of hours actually booked by the resources on assigned to the tasks.
If a project that is already in the system gains an additional tranche of funding for a new phase and we have decided that it ought not to be treated as a separate project, we can extend the funding of an existing project by first updating the "Budget" field for the project with the new funding total and then adding a new Task in the task list to allow the scheduling of the extension.
CapX offers three types of task "Fixed Units", "Fixed Duration" and "Fixed Work". The "Fixed Units" task still requires either duration or work to be fixed so it a sort of meta task type and will be rarely necessary to use. Instead, we will focus on the other two.
Each task has a Budget. The sum of the Budget for all the tasks in a project give the Planned Cost of the project. The planned cost reflects the amount of time we have allocated for the project on the RSE department books and hence this figure should be used as the cost billed to the customer. However, it is important that the Actual Cost as recorded from the time sheet system, are as close to the planned cost as possible to ensure customers get value for money (avoiding underspend) and the department isn't burdened with excessive costs (avoiding overspend).
Where we know how many days effort we want to allocate to a task, such as a burn-down type arrangement, we can make that task a "Fixed Work" task. When scheduling this type of task, CapX takes the percentage of the people assigned ("Units"), assumes 7 hours per day and 5 days per week (for 1 person at 1.0 FTE), correct for annual leave etc. by reducing the "real" estimated effort to 0.84 FTE and marches forward in time to compute the end date. This type of task allows us to bill using the day rate as the budget of the task is computed from the number of hours of effort so customers are paying "by the hour". This means that the customer is not billed for non-working days such as leave / closure or sickness. We can easily collect payment for this using a journal transfer for the exact amount worked (assuming the actuals matched the budget by the end of the associated tasks).
These types of tasks can be useful you want to precisely specify how long the engagement should last. If you assign a person at a particular FTE for that fixed period, CapX will then calculate how many hours effort (work) accumulate when that person works at the FTE given, for the number of days duration. It will automatically reduce the total effort based on the "real" estimate, i.e. by assuming that staff are only able to deliver 0.84 FTE of work for every 1.0 FTE assigned. This takes into account leave and closure days automatically. Duration in CapX is specified as the number of calendar days and hence includes weekends and bank holidays. The day rate used to compute PCM costs is calculated based on a particular RSE's spine point and is not the same for every team member so it is expected that the estimated cost of a fixed duration task will not be aligned with the funds collected via the PCM. To ensure that the budget is worked out correctly when someone is paid by PCM, v1.1+ offers the ability to specify a day rate for a particular RSE on a particular task. This can be inflated or decreased appropriately based on the RSE to ensure the budget for the task is calculated somewhere close to the actual amount being collected by the PCM.
For example, one week's work at 1.0 FTE (assuming 0.84 FTE of "real" effort) is 29.4 hours. Assuming the RSE is paid at the standard day rate this gives a cost of £9,172,80. But the PCM will cover 100% as it includes an allowance for holidays / closure / leave, which means it in calculated for 35 hours per week giving a cost of £10,920. So the rate we should use to calculate the correct cost for PCM billing would need to be 312 / .84 = £371.43 per day. This gives a cost for the 29.4 hours scheduled in CapX for the task as £10,920.04 which is close enough.
Of course, each financial year the spine points increase as presumably the PCM collection increases too. We can split long-running tasks at the financial year end and assign the same RSE again for the next financial year but at an increased day rate to ensure the budget remains correct. Ultimately, if they are paid via PCM, we don't particularly need to track this in CapX precisely so don't worry about it!
Task end dates are included in the assignable duration. So if you have a fixed duration task that starts on Monday 2nd January 2023 and runs for 7 days duration, the end date will show as Sunday 8th January 2023 (technically 6 days later) not 7 days later. An artefact of this is that the charts will not be able to display tasks that are 1 day in duration since the start and end date are the same and they are considered to have a zero value and hence no width on the chart.
When assigning an RSE to a task you must specify their assignment in FTE relative to a theoretical 1.0 FTE maximum. The capacity planner tooltips will show how much capacity they have spare out of the time they are available. If you want an RSE to work on a project "at 50%" i.e. 2.5 days per week then you will need to assign them to the task at 0.5 FTE. The duration of a fixed work task will be scheduled assuming that they only work 2.1 days per week with 0.4 days spent on leave or on a closure day. In practice, RSEs may book more hours per week to a task initially and the task will show as being ahead of schedule, but as soon as they take leave, this buffer will be eaten up and bring it back in line with the schedule. This is preferable than having to constantly adjust the schedule every time some takes a day off, or projects being shown as constantly behind.
Sometimes projects may be delayed due to RSEs taking a concentrated period of leave, staff sickness or strike action etc. It may just need more work than budgeted in order to deliver a viable MVP. The general policy for providing a "no-cost extension" to a project is to add a new fixed-duration task with a name like "NCE" or "Overrun" to the project and book any further time to this project. A record of the original budget will still be present in the project information but planned work will increase to reflect the increased cost for the RSE department. If the original project is fixed work, and work has been completed more slowly than expected, then actuals may still be booked to the original planned task(s) up to the maximum amount of work scheduled for the task will all extra actual work logged against the extension task. The total amount of actual work will then be accurately recorded as part of the project summary at the top of the page.