Chapter 6: Tracking Progress on Tasks

Chapter at a Glance

Set a baseline to take a “snapshot” of the current schedule for future comparison, page 123. Set progress on tasks through a specific date, page 125. Enter percent complete on specific tasks, page 127. Record a task’s actual duration, page 129.

In This Chapter, You will Learn How to:

• Save current values in a schedule as a baseline.

• Record progress on tasks through a specific date.

• Record a task’s percentage of completion.

• Enter actual work and duration values for tasks.

Tip 

Do you need only a quick refresher on the topics in this chapter? See the Quick Reference entries on pages xxv–xlviii.

Until now, you have focused on project planning-developing and communicating the details of a project before actual work begins. When work begins, so does the next phase of project management: tracking progress. Tracking means recording project details such as who did what work, when the work was done, and at what cost. These details are often called actuals.

Tracking actuals is essential to properly managing, as opposed to just planning, a project. The project manager must know how well the project team is performing and when’ to take corrective action. Properly tracking project performance and comparing it with the original plan allows you to answer such questions as these:

• Are tasks starting and finishing as planned? If not, what will be the impact on the project’s finish date?

• Are resources spending more or less time than planned to complete tasks?

• Are higher-than-anticipated task costs driving up the overall cost of the project?

Microsoft Office Project 2007 supports several ways to track progress. Your choice of a tracking method should depend on the level of detail or control required by you, your project sponsor, and other stakeholders. Tracking the fine details of a project requires additional work from you and possibly from the resources working on the project.

Therefore, before you begin tracking progress, you should determine the level of detail you need. The different levels of tracking detail include the following:

• Record project work as scheduled. This level works best if everything in the project occurs exactly as planned. Hey, it could happen!

• Record each task’s percentage of completion, either at precise values or at increments such as 25, 50, 75, or 100%.

• Record the actual start, actual finish, actual work, and actual and remaining duration for each task or assignment.

• Track assignment-level work by time period. This is the most detailed level of tracking. Here you record actual work values per day, week, or other interval.

Because different portions of a project might have different tracking needs, you might need to apply a combination of these approaches within a single project. For example, you might want to track high-risk tasks more closely than low-risk ones. In this chapter, you will perform the first three actions in the preceding list; the fourth (tracking assignment-level work by time period) is addressed in Part 2, “Advanced Project Scheduling.” For users of Project Professional and Project Server, enterprise-level tracking is addressed in Part 4, “Introducing Project Server.”

Important 

Before you can use the practice files provided for this chapter, you need to install them from the book’s companion CD to their default locations. See “Using the Book’s CD” on page xix for more information.