Planned vs. Actual

[nickc]

I cannot seem to separate planned work and duration from actual. Just now,
I worked with a task that was scheduled for start 4/7 Finish 4/8 work hours
of 16 (2 days 1 person). I tried to adjust on entry table to reflect the
actual start which was 4/7 and actual finish 4/9 with hours still 16 (actual
work) (worked 4/7 & 4/9 not 4/8), and entered remaining work 0. However the
actual work still wants to coincide w/ duration at 3 days (correct) and
actual work at 24 hrs (incorrect). I saw another posting on this where the
person simply had to make sure he entered the remaining work at 0, and
everything seemed to work fine. Must be something simple that I am missing.

 

[nickc]

Thanks Steve;

Yes I was just thinking about that (baseline) vs. actual vs. planned. I
checked with my ref. book and forgot about actual coinciding w/ planned. I
keep getting thrown by this because of what seems like redundancy having both
planned and actual fields & the one way link. I am adding the baseline
fields now to my tables.

 

[Steve House]

I like to think of it this way. Once you've saved your baseline and posted
in some actuals, the Tracking Table shows your actual performance to date,
the Entry table shows your perfomance to date and the forecast for the
future based on how things have gone so far, and any baseline fields show
what you initially thought was going to happen.

 

[Projectability]

A couple of points.

When viewing the Entry table the start and finish dates reflect what is
planned or scheduled to happen. If you update your schedule and record %
complete project will assume tasks started when scheduled. A lot of people
change actual start and finish dates when also editing % complete rather
than using the Tracking Table or Tracking Toolbar. Once progress has been
recorded the Start date and Actual start date are the same value, the
schedule reflects what has happened and what is scheduled to happen. If you
are not posting actual values reported by team members I would reccomend
using the Tracking Table and Toolbar to record progress trying to be as
detailed as possible, recording actual start, finish and work where
possible.

When recording progress the baseline values remain constant and can be used
to compare actuals against what was planned identifying any variances - it
is a sad fact of life that Project Managers do not get rewarded for things
going to plan but do get punished for things that don't.

I would suggest you avoid adding new columns to existing tables on a regular
basis, far better to create your own new tables to include the fields you
want to work with and save them to your Global.mpt using the Tools>Organiser
option - apart from being "consistent" it also avoids causing problems to
reports. A lot of the standard reports shipped with Microsoft Project are
based upon tables, the idea of the report is to focus the recipient on
particular information, the impact and value of the report can be diminished
if it includes an excessive number of fields that have been added to the
underlying table by users.

--
Dominic Moss

Projectability - Helping People achieve more with Microsoft Project

www.projectability.co.uk

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