Forum Discussion
% Work Complete Status
- parlisingn,
Duration doesn't necessarily "map" back to actual work. For your server example, it sounds like you should use fixed duration as your task type. Duration is entered as a week. The 3 hours of labor (work) to accomplish that task may be linearly spread over the week, occur all on the first day, all on the last day or any combination thereof.
John
Thanks for the screen shot, it doesn't tell me everything but it does give some critical information.
First, I note you have successor links on some summary lines. Summary lines are not tasks and should neither have links (predecessor/successor) nor resources assigned. I suggest you re-structure your plan to address that issue. The risk you run for not doing so is even more things that don't make sense.
Percent Work Complete is calculated by Project as, Actual Work / Work * 100%. Simply adding tasks to your plan will not change the % work complete value until actual work is accrued. If you manually edit tasks as complete via the % Work Complete field, because the option to link task status with resource status is checked, that will then also update the % Work Complete field.
When you say % Work Complete doesn't change even though you "significantly increase the amount of time", are you talking about increasing the task duration or the amount of work? I suspect you are referring to increasing the duration. Also, are there resource assigned to the tasks where you "increased the amount of time"?
When you say you are only about 5% into the project (billed versus forecasted) how does that relate to how the plan was updated (i.e. what was entered for work and actual work)? The 20% shown by Project is calculated based on that data, not on how much was billed.
John
- When you say % Work Complete doesn't change even though you "significantly increase the amount of time", are you talking about increasing the task duration or the amount of work?
- Task Duration
I suspect you are referring to increasing the duration.
Also, are there resource assigned to the tasks where you "increased the amount of time"?
- yes
When you say you are only about 5% into the project (billed versus forecasted) how does that relate to how the plan was updated (i.e. what was entered for work and actual work)? The 20% shown by Project is calculated based on that data, not on how much was billed.
- The actual hours vs forecasted hours was done by spreadsheet. Not in project. Plus from a PM perspective, (understanding where a project is) it doesnt feel right we are 20% done. More like 5-10% but that is subjective (e.g. we havent even gotten the trequirements documented), all the current work done is just prep and plannng.- parlisingh,
As I noted previously % Work Complete is Actual Work/Work * 100%. If you make changes that do not alter either of those variables, then you won't see a change in % Work Complete.
With regard to Project showing 20% versus your gut feel of 5% to 10%, someone is entering values in Project that cause Project to calculate the 20%. Percent Complete, which is duration based is very subjective but % Work Complete is a valid metric based on work to be done (Work plus Remaining Work) and work already completed (Actual Work). If your actual versus forecast hours on your spreadsheet is valid (i.e. actual data from a timekeeping system), then I suggest you modify the values entered into your Project plan to agree with the spreadsheet.
However, it sounds like you are actively working a plan that is premature (i.e. you don't have the full requirements). You might want to keep track of the prep and planning work as a separate file and then once the contract plan is developed, reviewed and ready for execution, set a baseline and move forward.
John- Thank you John for your help.
We have a seperate spreadsheet to calculate the hours per week a resource will work on the project and i can update that based on timesheet entry. So for example, the project may take 10 people, 1000 hours. I can see at any point of time what the actual hours has been entered and so some calculations from that.
With MS Project we use duration for a given task. Build a server may take 3 hours to build but may take a week to actual do based on availability of resource and other factors. So on my project plan, every task is based on duration and doesnt necessarily map back to actual work. I update the task based on what the resource tells me, e.g. i have done 50% of work or work is complete then mark the column in project. Which is probably not the right way to do it.
i may take up the linkedin course on MS Project to see if i need to change my approach