Share Cost and Schedule Information

When planning to integrate your Cobra project with a resource-loaded schedule, consider the best practice tips below.

• An activity in the schedule should correlate to a work package in Cobra.
• Activity durations should be from six to eight weeks in order to calculate accurate earned value (by collecting actual costs at the cost account level, you can reduce the number of charge numbers).
  Note: Activities with longer durations can be used if the progress technique of their work packages is Percent Complete. In this case, the Physical Percent Complete entry in the schedule should be based on something that can be measured objectively, such as the number of completed drawings.
• Budget revisions should begin in the schedule as additions or revisions and be updated in Cobra.

Because Cobra supports the milestones progress technique , it is also possible to set up a system where several activities in the schedule generate a single work package with milestones in Cobra. In this scenario, the baseline finish dates of the activities in the schedule can be correlated to the milestones in the work package.

Note, however, that the earned value is calculated as a weighted percentage for all budget elements of the work package. For this reason, this feature is best used when you do not plan to use a resource-loaded schedule.

While Cobra does have the ability to build the schedule and load the budget manually, this process does not promote integration between cost and schedule. The best usage of this feature would be to add the following items into the Cobra project:

• Level of effort and apportioned work packages
• Planning packages maintained in Cobra
• Budget revisions made in Cobra
• Adjusted resource hours updated in the scheduling software

You can then use powerful features in Cobra such as top-down planning to convert these resource loadings into a fully-costed budget baseline, and you can update the schedule with data from Cobra.

Note: Updating Open Plan resources with data from a Cobra project does not create activities in the project.

The Integration wizard is a user-friendly feature that allows you to define how your Cobra project should be created or updated from your schedule. The Integration Wizard also allows you to load code files from your schedule. You may save only the settings you have made for your configuration, or you may synchronize Cobra with your schedule as well.

The following is a list of items that can be loaded from a schedule:

• Code files
• Resource definitions and rates
• Budget
• Code assignments
• Status
• Forecast