hi i am having some issue in MS project progress update of fixed duration task

Hi chinthala91 

You can try these two options in this scenario you describe to obtain a result like the one you are looking for:

Option A: If the task is of type Fixed Duration, and the Actual Duration exceeds the Duration of the task before its update Project will set the % Complete to 100%.
In the event that the actual Duration is less than the previous one of its update, it takes as the final Duration of the task the working days between the Start and Finish dates, regardless of the interruption time that exists between them. Thus, and applying the formula, the % completed would be equal to 100 x Actual Duration / (Actual Duration + Remaining Duration), a value that may not be significant for the progress of the task, especially if the task is not continuous and has predecessors that interrupts the task and postpones the remaining Duration.

In this case the solution would be to change the Type of task before updating, to Fixed Units or Fixed Work, instead of Fixed Duration.

Option B: The other workaround is to delete, before updating, the predecessors that interrupt the task and postpone the Remaining Duration, in this case Id=5.

I hope I've helped.

Ignacio

chinthala91

A few questions are in order.

If the task is 50% complete, why is the actual duration AND the remaining duration both set at 12d? The original duration was scheduled for 7 days so even though you enter a percent complete value of 50%, as soon as you set actual duration to 12d, Project re-calculates percent complete as 100% (percent complete = actual duration/duration or 100% maximum).

So what really is the status of the task? It started early, I get that, but what about the 7 day planned duration versus the apparent 12d remaining duration? And if it's half done, is it now a 24d task?

Are any resources assigned to the task? Bear in mind that percent complete is duration based and has nothing to do with how much work is preformed. The only type of tasks that are truly duration based are things such as concrete curing, paint drying, wounds healing, etc. The vast majority of "stuff" that gets accomplished is via effort (work) performed by labor or machine resources. And progress is measured by how much actual work is performed compared to the estimated work to accomplish the task (i.e. percent work complete).

John