Microsoft Project 2010 : Capturing Project Progress (part 2) - Gathering Status Updates from Resources - Actual Start, Percent Work Complete, Remaining Work

The resources should periodically bring back their work and statute of task, or using the waiter of project or by other means, such as reports on the state of progress of the work or the weekly meetings. If your organization employs professional 2010 of project with the waiter of project, the statute of time of resource and task will be captured by the resource in the waiter of project and then subjected to a approver which can accept it or reject. The allowed time and statute are added to the project, and the real data in your project will be put up to date.

If your organization does not use the waiter of project, you must ask for the statute of time and task regularly and manually add these real data to your project. Let us say have to you a task in your project which lasts two week, with two resources assigned at 80 hours part. These resources provide you updates of statute in the e-mail, which you manually write in the project. The resources need to provide you with one of three different “packages” of status information:

• Actual start, percent work complete, and remaining work

• Actual start, actual work, remaining work, and an expected finish date

• Day-by-day timesheet of actual work per day, remaining work, and an expected finish date

The following sections walk you through what each of these options include, and where to enter the status information in Project, to get an accurate look at how your project is progressing.

Actual Start, Percent Work Complete, Remaining Work

This method of manually recording status is the fastest, but it is also likely the least accurate. With this method, resources provide you with the following:

• Actual Start— This is the date when the resource actually began working on the task.

• Percent (%) Work Complete— The % Work Complete field is used to capture approximately how much work has been done on a task, as a percentage.

• Remaining Work— This is the estimated amount of work that is left to be done on the task.

Using the earlier example, Figure 2 shows a task with a two-week duration (10 days), with two resources assigned at 80 hours each. Notice that the task is scheduled to start on 2/21/11 and finish on 3/4/11.

Figure 2. An example of a two-week task with two assigned resources

On 2/25/11, half way through the scheduled duration, the two assigned resources provide the following information:

• Resource 1— Began work on the task on 2/21/11, currently about 50% complete, with about 40 more hours of work left to do.

• Resource 2— Began work on the task on 2/22/11, currently about 60% complete, with about 20 hours of work left to do.

To enter resource status data in Project, you first need to display the corresponding fields, using the following steps:

These fields being shown, now you can add information of state which you received from the resources assigned with the task. This information of state is written in the line of task for the task, in the sight of use of resource. Lines of task are notched below name of each resource.

First, add the information from Resource 1, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3. The Resource Usage view, with status data from Resource 1 added

To add status data from a resource, follow these steps:

If you go back to the Gantt Chart view and take a look, you’ll see a progress bar added over the Gantt bar for the task, representing how far along the task is, with just Resource 1’s status data added (shown in Figure 4).

Figure 4. The Gantt Chart view, after adding status data from Resource 1

Next, you need to go back to the Resource Usage view and add in the status data provided by Resource 2, as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5. The Resource Usage view, with status data from Resource 2 added

Tokens an eye more attentive with calculations continuing here. In the example, resource 2 has 80 work hours programmed. It reports that it is approximately 60% complete, with approximately 20 work hours remaining on the task. When you enter the percent of this resource function complete, project start while calculating how much real work was completed, using this formula:

So, in this example, Project uses the following equation to calculate Actual Work:

Begin by dividing both sides of the equation by 100:

This trims down the equation to the following:

Then multiply both sides by 80 to solve for Actual Work:

This leaves you with the Actual Work value:

Once Project has calculated the Actual Work, the next step is to calculate Remaining Work, using the following formula:

In this example, the following equation is used:

The resulting value for the Remaining Work column is 32 hours of work remaining on the task.

However, recall that one of the values that the resource provided in his status report was an estimate of the remaining work on the task, and that estimate was 20 hours. At this point, you need to decide which you think is more accurate: the resource’s estimate on what percentage of the work is complete, or the resource’s estimate on how many hours it will take to complete the task. If you think the resource’s remaining work estimate is more accurate, enter that in the Remaining Work column, and Project will recalculate the % Work Complete value, using the formulas we just walked through.

Now, let’s go back and look at the task in the Gantt Chart view, with status data from both resources added (shown in Figure 6). The vertical line shows the current date, and the progress bar extends beyond that date, indicating that this task is ahead of schedule.

Figure 6. The Gantt Chart view, after adding status data from Resource 2

After you add the actual start, percent work complete, and remaining work provided by the resources assigned to a task, a best practice is to reevaluate the finish date for the task. The status data you just entered may have pushed the finish date for the task out, or made it possible to shorten the duration and get the task done sooner. These changes may have an impact on other tasks in your project, or even on other projects that are dependent on your project: Actual Start, Actual Work, Remaining Work, Expected Finish Date.

This method of recording status requires that resources provide you with the following:

• Actual Start— This is the date when the resource actually began working on the task.

• Actual Work— This is the number of hours a resource has currently put in on the task.

• Remaining Work— This is the estimated amount of work that is left to be done on the task.

• Expected Finish Date— This is the resource’s best guess for a date when the task will be completed.

You can capture this status information in the Resource Usage or Task Usage view. The previous section used the Resource Usage view, so this section walks through using the Task Usage view to enter assignment information.

Returning to the previous example, you are managing a project with a task that has a 10-day duration, with two resources assigned at 80 hours each.

On 2/25/11, half way through the scheduled duration, the two assigned resources provide the following information:

• Resource 1— Began work on the task on 2/21/11, completed 40 hours of work, about 40 more hours of work left to do, estimated finish of 3/4/11.

• Resource 2— Began work on the task on 2/22/11, completed 48 hours of work, about 20 hours of work left to do, estimated finish of 3/2/11.

To enter resource status data in Project, first you need to display the corresponding fields, using the following steps:

With these fields displayed, now you can add the status information you received from the resources assigned to the task. This status information is entered in the assignment row for the task, in the Task Usage view. Assignment rows are indented below each task’s name. If you are using the Resource Usage view, assignment rows are indented below each resource’s name.

First, add the information from Resource 1, as shown in Figure 7.

Figure 7. The Task Usage view, with status data from Resource 1 added

To add status data from a resource, follow these steps:

Repeat this to add in the status data provided by Resource 2. Notice that after adding the 20 hours of remaining work, when you add the estimated Finish date of 3/2/11, the Remaining Work column is adjusted. This is because Project is assuming that the resource worked 8-hour days. To correct this, you can use the right, timephased portion of the Task Usage view, as shown in Figure 8.

Figure 8. The right portion of the Task Usage view spreads the work values across a timeline.

To adjust actual work values in the timephased portion of the Task Usage view, follow these steps:

In the example, because Project assumed the resource was working 8-hour days, the timephased data shows six 8-hour days (totaling 48 hours), when the resource actually worked four 12-hour days. Figure 9 shows what the timephased data looks like initially.

Figure 9. Timephased data in the Task Usage view, before correction.

Figure 10 shows the corrected timephased data.

Figure 10. Timephased data in the Task Usage view, after correction.

After the timephased data is corrected, the Finish column reflects the resource’s reported estimated finish date for the task, as shown in Figure 11.

Figure 11. Reported resource status data, after correcting timephased data.