Project actually tracks three separate completion metrics ... % Complete,
based on scheduled duration; % Work Complete, based on scheduled work; and %
Physical Complete, a user input value of the manager's subjective estimate
of physical progress (totally unreliable for the most part IMHO). Note that
none of these are based on a comparison of actual progress against
baseline - they're all actual against current schedule while baseline is the
original unadjusted schedule before any progress updates were posted. The
difference is, you initially estimated task X would take 5 days, so that's
the baseline. You got 3 days into the task and realised it would really
take 10 days to do it all, not 5 as originally planned and so you enter that
information in when entering progress. At this point in time, Actual
Duration = 3 days, Remaining Duration = 7 days, thus (current Scheduled)
Duration = 10 days, while Baseline Duration remains = 5 days (the orginal
estimate). % Complete at the moment is 30% (3/10), not 60% (3/5), because
you have done 30% of the total work that it now appears will be required to
complete the task. What you originally thought it would take is meaningless
when it comes to predicting the project outcome but changing the baseline to
reflect the new estimate totall destroys your ability to ever know whether
you're on schedule and within budget since the schedule you've committed to
and the budget you've developed are based on those initial estimates.
Project assumes work performed tracks in sync with duration consumed by
default. So if we have done 3 days out of 5 scheduled we have also done
whatever work was scheduled on those days. If this isn't true in your case,
go to the Tools, Options menu, Calculation page, and clear the checkbox
beside the "Updating task status updates resource status" setting. Now you
can enter duration passed and work performed indpendently but it will
increase your workload when posting progress as you will have to remember to
manually update both fields.
FYI - % Complete and % Work Complete may or may not be the same number, even
when progress is going precisely according to schedule. If I have a 5 day
task with the resource working full-time on it, duration is 40 hours and
work is 40 hours. At the end of the day on Day 4 with everything going as
scheduled, 32 hours of duration has passed and 32 hours of work has been
done. % Complete is 32/40 or 80%. % Work Complete is also 32/40 or 80%.
But consider a heavily contoured task with 4 days of work with just 1 hour
scheduled at the start of each day and then a big finish on the 5th day of 8
hours. Duration is still 40 hours but work is only 12 hours. At the end of
the day of Day 4 with everything on schedule we have Duration at 32/40 or
80%, but Work at 4/12 or 33%.
