Forcasted Finish

[Jeff H]

Is there a way to make Project recalculate the finish date based upon percent
complete? If I assume it takes 100 days to complete a task, I should be 33%
complete at day 33. But what if I am actually 50% complete at day 33? Can
project forcast a revised completion date of 66 days? I think I am asking
the program to compare work complete vs. actual time incurred. If there is a
way to do this it would be very helpful to me in my project tracking.

I need to keep this very simple, as I am only interested in total duraton
for several buildings we are developing, and I need an easy way to see if the
building is running ahead or behind our scheduled delivery date. We do not
schedule resources and are simply looking for a tool to help us understand
where we are at any given point of time.

 

[JulieS]

Hi Jeff,

I suggest instead of using the % Complete, you record actual start,
actual duration and remaining duration. All of those fields are
available in the Tracking Table applied to the Task Sheet (left side of
the Gantt chart view.)

I hope this helps. Let us know how you get along.

Julie

 

[Mike Glen]

Hi Jeff,

Welcome to this Microsoft Project newsgroup

Try using Tools/Tracking/Update Project... and select to Reschedule
uncompleted work to start after... (the date shown is the Status date if
you've entered it or the Current date, but you can select any date you
want). This will push out the end date as you wanted, provided you haven't
introduced any constraint dates.

FAQs, companion products and other useful Project information can be seen at
this web address: http://project.mvps.org/faqs.htm

Hope this helps - please let us know how you get on

Mike Glen
MS Project MVP
See http://tinyurl.com/2xbhc for Project Tutorials

 

[Jeff H]

Mike and Julie, thanks for responding, however:

Mike - when I execute your suggestion it just changes the percent complete
to what should be complete as of today or the date I specify. If the task is
50% complete today and only 25% of the days have elapsed I want the program
to re-adjust the number of days it takes to complete the task based upon the
progress.

Julie - If I record actual duration, I will have to calculate the remaing
duration each time I up-date. I would rather not do this as we track about
75 projects.

 

[Mike Glen]

Hi Jeff,

OK. Make sure you're aware of the difference between %Complete and %Work
Complete. When you enter Actual Duration, you then need to enter Remaining
Duration and Project will calculate the correct percentages. Then you can
update.

You might like to have a look at my series on Microsoft Project in the
TechTrax ezine, particularly #26 & 27 on Progressing, at this site:
http://tinyurl.com/2xbhc or this:
http://pubs.logicalexpressions.com/Pub0009/LPMFrame.asp?CMD=ArticleSearch&AUTH=23
(Perhaps you'd care to rate the articles before leaving the site,
Thanks.)

FAQs, companion products and other useful Project information can be seen at
this web address: <http://www.mvps.org/project/>

Hope this helps - please let us know how you get on

Mike Glen
MS Project MVP

 

[Jeff H]

Can you do it the other way? enter the %Complete and have project
recalculate the new durations?

 

[Mike Glen]

I don't think so. Project does not handle well with entering percentages as
it prefers to calculate these.

Mike Glen
Project MVP

 

[Jan De Messemaeker]

Hi,
Update Project has two buttons, sounds you took the first opne instead of
the second (reschedule wok) which is what Mike suggested
HTH

 

[Steve House [MVP]]

That task simply cannot be 50% complete when only 25% of the days have
passed. Percent Complete refers to duration and when 25% of the days have
passed the task is 25% Complete by definition. If on that date you expected
work to also be 25% complete - ie, it was flat line in sync with the
duration and not contoured - and you find it's actually 50%, that indicates
you had over-estimated the amount of work required. If we expected to take
100 days and at the end of 25 days we say that the work is 50% done, that
means our initial estimate should have been 50 days and not 100. The only
way Project can know about such corrections to the schedule is if you revise
your estimates - ie, manually enter a remaining duration.

 

[Steve House [MVP]]

No - When you enter something the % Complete field, Project assumes the
total Duration is correct and calculates the Actual and Remaining durations
from it based on the percentage you've input.