Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Project 2013. The last exercise I gave
you to do will have been to save a baseline as example_14 and our building project now looks like this. If we looked at the baseline data, baseline start, baseline finish, and so on everything’s got values now. Let’s go to the Project tab and click on Project Information, and we have a project start date of April 2nd and the finish date of June 18th. Now in fact, the building completes sometimes before that. In fact, it just about achieves our deadline of the end of May. But the tasks that are continuing are some site inspections. This will quite often be the case when there’s some sort of snagging and correction work and clearing up to and so on. This milestone here, 39 building completed, only really denotes the completion of the actual physical building.
So let’s now also click on Statistics and if we click on statistics now, not only have we got a current start and finish but we’ve got a baseline start and finish now. So, the next missing part of the statistics on our project have now appeared. Now, of course, at this stage the baseline agrees with the current plan, as you would expect, because we’ve only just saved the baseline. What we’re going to start to do in this section is to start recording some actual information.
Before we start recording actual information, I’d like to point out two very important things. The first of them is that getting reliable information about actual progress tends to be a much more difficult task than recording it in Microsoft Project. There are various techniques for assembling information. You might have people that complete time sheets. You may walk around members of the team that are working on a project and ask how they’re getting on, check with them what they’ve completed, what they haven’t completed, and so on. But the problems that most people get related to keeping track of actual information tend to be a combination of people having a usually rather over optimistic view of how far they are through a task and the fact that sometimes it’s a little bit too easy to just assume that everything’s on track. So to a large extent the success you’re going to have with tracking progress is going to depend on how good you are at getting the correct source information to update Microsoft Project with. Sometimes this is primarily down to putting in the right sort of processes but often it’s also due to your own ability to get a
good feeling for how well or badly things are going and maybe to some extent which figures or whose figures you can trust and which figures you can’t. Now Microsoft Project can only work with the numbers you give it. So if you tell it that a task is half complete, it would just put down half complete. It’s not going to say to you, Are you sure it’s half complete? It only looks a quarter complete to me. So you really need to make sure that the figures that you’re putting in are as accurate as they can be.
The second thing to point out is that when we’re tracking progress, some of the techniques that we use are automated or at least semi-automated. Largely speaking those processes cannot be used with manually scheduled tasks. If your project or projects include manually scheduled tasks tracking progress, updating progress on those is a manual process. So you’d need to look at each of those each time you do a progress update and manually update the status of any manually scheduled tasks. Now the meaning of that will become more apparent over the next section or two as we start looking at the various ways of updating and tracking progress.
Now it’s potentially quite difficult to show you how to update progress on a project which for you will be set in the past and where I have a certain date when I’m recording this course and so on. So I’m afraid you’re going to have to just go with me a little bit on the dates that we’re using here. The date currently actually is April the 8th and this particular project in theory has been running for about a week. One of the great things about Project 2013 is that as part of the process of not only planning and scheduling but tracking progress on a project, we can change the current date, so we can cheat, and we can also set the status date because the important thing when we’re tracking progress is that we’re looking at the status as it was on a date. It will very often be the case that when you’re looking at progress on a project it won’t be progress as of now. Let me give you an example.
Several of the projects that I’ve worked on in the recent past have involved quite a long period of time and perhaps once a month, maybe at the end of the month, the people working on the project are required to give an update on their progress; to look at all the tasks they’re responsible for and record how much work they’ve done, whether they’ve finished, whether the task is going to take longer or less time than they said, and so on. Now at the end of the month, we gather all that information together and it often takes a few days before we can collate that all, update our project, and publish the findings. It may well be the fourth or fifth working day of
the month before we can update status as at the end of the previous month. So what happens is when you’re entering this status information, it’s quite often entering status information that’s a few days old. But it’s important to point out when you’re recording the information which date the status actually applies to. If I’m updating status, say, for March 2013 on April the 8th
, I don’t want it to look as though it’s the status on April the 8th. I want it to look as though it’s the status
at the end of March.
So before you update status, the first thing you’re going to do is to specify what the status date is. If I go in to Project Information, if I choose a current date, let’s stick with the current date of April 8th, and I set a status date of April 5th, what I’m saying effectively is that on April 8th I’m recording the status as it was on Friday, April 5th. So I’ve got a current date and I’ve got a status date.
Now according to my schedule on April the 5th what should have happened is that I should have had the first site inspection and the demolition work should be well progressed. It’ll almost be finished. But according to the Gantt Chart nothing else will have started. So that’s the status as it should be and in fact what I’m going to record is the fact that that is the status. That’s exactly what’s happened. We’ve had the first site inspection, the demolition is well under way, almost finished, and that’s really where we’d got to on Friday.
And just before we start the update process, I need to show you one other table. We were looking at the baseline table here. Let’s now choose the table Tracking. For any tasks within the schedule, once you record any kind of tracking information, any progress against it, then it has an actual start date and really the whole project has an actual start date when the first task has an actual start date. If we just go back for a moment to that Project Information Statistics dialog that I showed you before, that has N/A, nothing. Actual start none, finish none, and then actual duration, work, cost, none, none, none. Nothing’s happened until we do the first bit of tracking. Once we do the first bit of tracking, then the contents of these tracking fields start to appear. And just briefly to describe them, the actual start date is the actual start date for individual tasks or summary tasks and indeed an actual start date for the whole project which is the first recorded start date for anything in the project. Actual finish will go into each task or summary task as it’s completed. Percent complete, think of that as a sort of estimate of the percent complete, the amount of work complete on each individual task or summary task. Physical percent complete is
the actual measured percent complete. I’ll talk about percent complete and physical percent complete later on. And then we have an actual duration. That’s the duration that’s actually gone by and the amount of duration that remains, the remaining duration. So these actuals, together with things like actual cost and actual work, are the recorded values for each of the tasks in our project. At the moment, none of them have any values, but as soon as you start tracking they start to get values.
So what we do now is on the Project tab in the Status Group we select Update project and this is the dialog that you’ll normally use to update the whole project or some part of the project on a regular basis. Now we’re going to use the most straightforward options possible to begin with. The status date, Friday, April 5th, is in the box here. It’s another chance to change it here if necessary. I’m actually completing this on the following Monday, April the 8th
. And the first option is Update the work as though it is complete through. What we’re basically saying here is that when we use this option, then with the top option selected what’s actually happened is what is scheduled to happen. So whatever’s supposed to have happened by now has happened and we’re basically completely on track. So update the work as complete through, set 0% to 100% complete. So for tasks that are partially complete calculate what proportion complete they are. There is a second option here and what this option says is that if a task is scheduled to be complete, then it’s complete. If it’s not scheduled to be complete, so maybe it’s not scheduled to be started yet or it’s not scheduled to be finished anyway. Maybe it’s a quarter or a half or three- quarters or something, set it as 0%. You then have this option which says for any uncompleted work schedule it to start after today. So what this is basically saying is that the project as I’ve got it marked now with various tasks complete, un-started, or in various stages of completeness, what I want you to do is reschedule the whole thing as though it’s starting again from today with all that uncompleted work. And then you have a choice here that says do I want to do this for the whole project or for the selected tasks? Now we’re going to work on the whole project and we’re going to choose the top option, Update work as complete through and the Set 0% to 100% complete option, and then all we have to do is to click on OK. And what Project 2013 now does is to update our status. So let me just pull the divider over and let’s have a look at the table. One of the tasks, ID 2, is the first site inspection which was scheduled to take place on the first Tuesday. Look carefully at what’s happened to that. It has now an actual start date. It has an
actual finish date. So that task is 100% complete which is what’s indicated there. The actual duration, two hours, the actual cost, $116, the actual work, four hours. The site foreman and the project manager did two hours each so that’s four hours and at their various rates of pay that’s $116. So that task cost $116 and it’s complete.
Now as soon as task two got an actual start date, then the summary task, task ID 1 that owns it also got an actual start date. Of course, the summary task is not finished yet because it owns all of the other site inspections, but it is 8% complete. So because one of the site inspections is complete, it is 8% complete. And figures such as actual cost and actual work are going to roll up into that summary task over time. So we can see how the fact that one of the subtasks has some progress means that we now have some progress in the summary task.
Now let’s turn our attention down to the demolition task which is the only other actual task that has started. But with this task, although it started on Tuesday, April 2nd, it is not yet complete. It was a five day task. We completed four days, up to Friday. So that was Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and we have one day remaining duration. That’ll actually be the work being done today. So the task is 80% complete. Now you may or may not have noticed this before but a total of five days for that was half of the work within the prepare site summary task. So the fact that we’ve done 80% of half of the work means that as far as the summary task, prepare site is concerned we’ve done 40% of the summary task. The summary task has an actual start date but of course no actual finish date yet because that work is not finished. We’ve got an actual duration of four days, a remaining duration of six days. That’s 40% and we can see what so far the actual cost and the actual work have been.
So those two tasks represent all of the progress so far on the project and for each of those two tasks they also have an impact on their respective summary tasks as well.
So having seen how to record actual information for a project, in the next section we’re going to move things forward another week and see how progress on the build is going then. So please join me for that.
Video: Tools for Tracking Progress
Toby: Hello and welcome back to our course on Project 2013. In the previous section, we did
our first week’s worth of progress updating and we indicated that progress on Friday of the first week of work on the build was on schedule. We did this on the following Monday. And a little bit later on we’re going to put in progress for the next week, but before we do that I’d like you to look at some of the other tools that will help you with both understanding what we’ve done so far and identifying the use of further tools to help with tracking progress in Project 2013.
Now we’re currently looking at our project in Gantt View and I’m just going to zoom in a little bit. So let me just use the zoom slider there to zoom in, and then I’m going to drag right back here to the first of the site inspections and that’s the one that’s complete. What you can notice there is that there is now a line through that task and what that basically says is that that is a task that is complete. Now if I just zoom back out again and now we look down at the task below it, demolition. We indicated demolition was 80% complete, four days out of five. Notice that the line there goes only as far as the progress that we’ve indicated when we’ve done the progress update. Note the shading here indicates the weekend Saturday and Sunday. So although we’ve done 80% of the work, we haven’t put a line through 80% of the line. Having said that, there is a line through the middle of 80% of the working part of the line. So 80% is the bit from there to there and the other 20% is the work that’s to be done today, Monday. So the line through the task like this is one of the visual cues that you can use in a Gantt Chart to show you how much of a task or a range of tasks is complete. Having said that, don’t forget you can customize the view of a Gantt Chart and we’re going to look at that later on in the course.
But in addition to those visual cues within a standard Gantt Chart, if you go to the drop down here for the view, there is another Gantt Chart called a Tracking Gantt. If I click on Tracking Gantt, let me just pull the divider over here a little, the tracking Gantt can also be extremely useful because it still shows us the bars but it also shows us in numbers to the right of the Gantt itself the percent complete of each task. Now this percent complete replaces in the standard definition, the standard formatting the list of names of the resources, but if you’re really trying to get a quick look at percent complete of tasks both visually in terms of how much filling on the bar there is and also with the numbers on the right, then the Tracking Gantt can be really useful as well.
So let’s now look back at the Project tab and the Project Information and let’s look at statistics because now that we’ve got some recorded progress, our statistics are starting to fill out. We have a start date for the current start date, the baseline start date, and the actual start date. Obviously, we don’t have an actual finish yet. We’ve not finished the project. But in the lower half of the statistics box here we can see that in terms of percent complete, in 7% of the duration of the project we’ve done 6% of the work. We also have a summary here of duration 53.25 days. We’ve actually done 3.84 days and we’ve got 49.41 days remaining. Of the 616 hours of work, we’ve done 36 hours. We’ve got 580 hours to do. And in terms of the overall cost, we’ve so far