Forum Discussion
Basic Question - "Cost Variance" always equals "Cost"
Hi esmitheccit,
The variance is a calculation between a data (start, finish, work, cost, duration) and the baseline data. The baseline is a snapshot of your project so you can at any time measure the difference between what was planned and what is happening.
So basically you need to schedule your project, save a baseline. From that the variances will be equal to 0 before you do any update. As soon as you'll update any tasks, you'll see variance.
Now about progress tracking. The best practice is not to update the % complete. Because if you update the %complete to 100%, it will consider that the task took the planned work to be completed, which might not be the case. I advice that you update the actual work. Then if the actual work is less than the planned work but the task is complete, just set the remaning work to 0. It will automatically update the % complete to 100%.
Hi esmitheccit,
The variance is a calculation between a data (start, finish, work, cost, duration) and the baseline data. The baseline is a snapshot of your project so you can at any time measure the difference between what was planned and what is happening.
So basically you need to schedule your project, save a baseline. From that the variances will be equal to 0 before you do any update. As soon as you'll update any tasks, you'll see variance.
Now about progress tracking. The best practice is not to update the % complete. Because if you update the %complete to 100%, it will consider that the task took the planned work to be completed, which might not be the case. I advice that you update the actual work. Then if the actual work is less than the planned work but the task is complete, just set the remaning work to 0. It will automatically update the % complete to 100%.
Thanks so much, this seemed to do the trick. For me the two keys were to set the baseline and to display the "remaining work" column and zero that out. Once I did that it changed percent complete to 100% automatically, and my cost variance fields displayed properly as well.
esmitheccit I think I spoke too soon. This seemed to work fine when I had individual projects but once I created subprojects it stopped working.
Right now I have two subprojects part of a master project. I have baselined the entire thing again and zeroed out all "actual duration" entries.
If I have a task that has a "Duration" of 1 hour but I enter in the "Actual Duration" as 0.5 hours and then set "Remaining Work" to zero, it then changes my "Duration" value back to 0.5 hours and it makes the "Duration Variance" positive 0.5 hours.
Perhaps there's a different column/metric I should be using to indicate how much work/time WAS spent on a task (vs what was originally scheduled)?
esmitheccitThat's how it works. if you input the actual duration which is less than the scheduled duration, then MSP will truncate the task to that lesser duration, there is no remaining duration, and there is now an actual start and an actual finish which replace the scheduled start and scheduled finish. If you input an actual duration greater than scheduled duration, the task is extended, and so on.
