Microsoft Project Version 2002 Inside Out (Inside Out (Microsoft))

Chapter 11

During the execution phase of your project, your resources are working on their tasks, and you're tracking their progress by entering actuals into your project plan. Those actuals, combined with your baseline information, give you the means to compare your current progress against your original plan. As part of your project control responsibilities, you use this information to keep an eye on project progress. In this way, you can analyze project performance, see how you're doing, and take any corrective action that you might deem necessary.

As you monitor and analyze project performance on a day-to-day basis, occasionally you'll need to make adjustments. Perhaps one task is finished a few days early, and this affects its successors and their assigned resources. Maybe another task took longer than expected and went overbudget. Suppose various changes in the schedule caused a resource to become overallocated and another one to be underutilized.

You might find that you need to adjust your project plan here and there to account for these variances. Sometimes, the differences work in your favor, as might be the case in a task finishing early. Other times, the differences point to a potential problem, which you can prevent if you catch it soon enough.

The nature of the changes you make depends on the priorities of your project. Remember the one fixed side of your project triangle (finish date, budget/resources, or scope), and adjust your project accordingly.

For more information about the project triangle, see Chapter 9, "Checking and Adjusting the Project Plan."

In addition to the day-to-day monitoring and adjusting of a project in progress, sometimes larger modifications are needed because of external changes imposed on the project. For example, your customers might announce that you must move the finish date up six weeks. Or a new corporate edict might cut $8,000 from your budget or reduce your staff by 10 percent.

Also, sometimes wholesale changes to the project are needed because the scheduled finish date, overall cost, or resource allocation has somehow gotten way off track. In this case, radical measures might be needed to bring the project into conformance again.

With large, externally imposed changes or a temporarily derailed project, you might need to replan or reschedule the project. The techniques used are similar to those you used to hit your targets when you were first planning the project. You make adjustments to the schedule, costs, resources, or scope in your project plan, and Microsoft Project recalculates your schedule so you can quickly see the results of your replanning.

Baseline, Actual, and Scheduled Project Information

In the course of monitoring project performance, there are four terms to keep in mind:

Baseline. The baseline dates, costs, durations, and so on, are your project plan's values at the time you saved baseline information. This is also referred to as planned information.

Actual. The actual progress information includes data such as percent complete, actual work, actual finish date, and so on.

Scheduled. The current project combines the project's actual performance on tasks with the planned schedule for current and future tasks. Together, this forms the current plan as scheduled. This is also referred to as current information, or the current plan.

Variance. The difference between baseline information and scheduled information is the variance. Microsoft Project subtracts the baseline value from the scheduled value (which has incorporated any actuals you have entered) to calculate the variance. So a positive variance means you're behind in your schedule or over budget, whereas a negative variance means you're ahead of the game—finishing faster or under budget. A variance of 0 indicates that your baseline and scheduled values are exactly the same. If actuals have been entered, this means that everything went exactly according to plan. If the task is still in the future, this means that projections forecast that the task will still go according to plan.

Whether you're making large adjustments to respond to large issues or small adjustments to keep a healthy project well on its way, you can always keep a close eye on progress. You can analyze the current status of the project and decide on any corrective actions necessary.

It might seem odd that variances are calculated from scheduled values rather than actual values. However, because the scheduled values incorporate any actual values, it makes sense. And by not requiring actual values to make the calculation, you can see variances in future tasks as well. If you see any large variances projected for future tasks or for the project as a whole, you'll still have time to take corrective action and head off the problems.