Hello,
on one of the project schedules i am working on, they want to have not only the construction costs but also all other type of costs such as company overhead, design stage, procurement contingency etc distributed over time as well.

to approach this task do i just create independent activities called overhead or design for instance and enter them in to the schedule or do i need to create a separate summary schedule - this is going to upper management of that company so they only care about main distribution of costs over time, not how individual construction trades distribute

so as a result i need to include non work scope items into the schedule to show it together with the real construction scope items in the schedule.



how do i approach this situation?

I would add separate "costing" tasks to the project as milestones and add the overhead costs to those milestones. You might add several milestones to help with the cost spread.

The design phase would be actual tasks as they do consume human resources.

Julie

you said milestones but milestones have 0 duration. but they like to see these cost items distributed over time. so i would not do it as milestones but as activities right?

also, when i do this, they would inadvertently affect my % complete overall schedule. even if they arent part of my construction project, MS project will think it taht way. I guess there is no way to avoid it right?

As I said, add multiple milestones to spread the non-work costs out over time. As milestones have zero duration, they will not affect your project schedule. You will need to make sure you mark the milestone tasks as complete - but you can do that as you mark progress on your other tasks.