Project reporting without duration

[GLT]

Hi,

I have inherited a project that was a huge list of tasks.
I broke the project up into chunks and restructured the list tasks.

The problem with this project is that over the past year, staff has been
doing bits of the project and also other non project work.

When I look at the project plan now, it currently reports it as 51% complete.

From my own analysis, I think it around 80% complete.

The problem is this:

The project is reporting durations 310 days (in one section, 308 days in
another section, 156.75 days in another).

I understand that duration is a factor for a project finish date, but at
this stage I am not interested in including the duration as part of the %
complete.

I only would like to see how much work has been done, and how much work is
left to complete (i.e. I do not want duration to be a factor in the %
complete result).

Can anyone advise how I would achieve this?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Cheers.

 

[John]

Hi,

I have inherited a project that was a huge list of tasks.
I broke the project up into chunks and restructured the list tasks.

The problem with this project is that over the past year, staff has been
doing bits of the project and also other non project work.

When I look at the project plan now, it currently reports it as 51% complete.

From my own analysis, I think it around 80% complete.

The problem is this:

The project is reporting durations 310 days (in one section, 308 days in
another section, 156.75 days in another).

I understand that duration is a factor for a project finish date, but at
this stage I am not interested in including the duration as part of the %
complete.

I only would like to see how much work has been done, and how much work is
left to complete (i.e. I do not want duration to be a factor in the %
complete result).

Can anyone advise how I would achieve this?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Cheers.

GLT,
Percent complete is duration based so they can't be separated. However,
it sounds like you should really be looking at % Work Complete which is
work based.

It's interesting that your "analysis" shows the project to be 80%
complete. How did you arrive at that value? In other words, what exactly
was your "analysis"?

Unless your project has tasks that are strictly time based, and very few
are in the real world, the real measure of how much progress has been
completed is by examining the work fields. There is the Work field
itself which is the current estimate of the effort required by one or
more resources to complete the task, there is the Actual Work field
which is the amount of effort completed thus far, and there is the
Remaining Work field which obviously is the difference between work and
actual work. Then there is also the Baseline Work field which is used to
capture the original work estimate.

However, even though you may not want to display duration or % complete,
those fields will still be calculated by Project.

For more information about any of Project's fields, add the desired
field as a column in the view and then hover your mouse over the column
title. In a moment a link to the help topic on that field will appear.

Hope this helps.
John
Project MVP

 

[GLT]

Hi John,

Thanks for your reply...

A colleague of mine and I went through the project plan and deleted chunks
that we determined were not related to this project.

The % complete still displayed 51% - when I had a look at the tasks that had
been removed and tasks that had been completed, there was not a huge amount
of the project to complete (that was my analysis - looked roughly about 70 -
80 % complete).

I have now displayed % work complete and the other fields that you have
suggested (and the % work complete figure is at 43%, which is worse than what
we had before).

I am now guessing that the estimated work is too high (as every time a new
task is entered it automatically gets 1 day allocated), which isforcing the %
work complete figure to be lower than what I would expect - am I on the right
path here?

Cheers,
GLT

 

[John]

Hi John,

Thanks for your reply...

A colleague of mine and I went through the project plan and deleted chunks
that we determined were not related to this project.

The % complete still displayed 51% - when I had a look at the tasks that had
been removed and tasks that had been completed, there was not a huge amount
of the project to complete (that was my analysis - looked roughly about 70 -
80 % complete).

I have now displayed % work complete and the other fields that you have
suggested (and the % work complete figure is at 43%, which is worse than what
we had before).

I am now guessing that the estimated work is too high (as every time a new
task is entered it automatically gets 1 day allocated), which isforcing the %
work complete figure to be lower than what I would expect - am I on the right
path here?

Cheers,
GLT

GLT,
It sounds like your "analysis" was an arm-chair assessment. That's fine,
it is always a good idea to step back and look at the whole plan from
time to time and apply a "gut feel" assessment. If you always assume the
plan is correct and believe the data it is providing, it can lead you
astray.

If the % Work Complete field is showing a low value, based on your gut
assessment, then most likely the original work estimate was too high or
enough "credit" wasn't taken for work completed.

Simply adding a new task will NOT lower the % Work Complete value.
Adding a new task DOES automatically give an initial duration estimate
of 1 day, but duration is NOT work. The only way a new task will lower
the % Work Complete value is by assigning a work resource to the task or
specifically entering an estimated value in the Work field.

John
Project MVP

 

[GLT]

Hi John,

Thanks for your reply - yes it was an arm-chair assesment (love that term
) - my whole issue here is that we deleted tasks (and updated other tasks
as completed) that was not meant to be in the project plan in the first
place, so I would have assumed the % complete would have gone up - which it
didnt.

So, I am thinking that the original work estimate like you said is too high.
But then I don't really care about the work estimate.

All i would like to focus on is how many tasks have been completed, and how
many more are left to go - at least that what my boss wants me to report on.

Cheers,
GLT.

 

[Rod Gill]

Hi,

Number of tasks completed is great if you have a reasonable number of them,
they are all roughly the same duration and you have included all tasks to
finish the project. If you have 20 short tasks and the last two are 10 times
longer, you could be 80% complete with no idea less than half the effort and
duration is done.

Accurate reporting is based on progress towards completing business
deliverables (activity is not necessarily progress!!). So, include all
deliverables in your schedules and all tasks required to complete them. Then
track progress towards delivering business deliverables based on whether
time, cost, quality, business value, stakeholder needs, team satisfaction
are most important.

--

Rod Gill
Project MVP

Project VBA Book, for details visit:
http://www.projectvbabook.com

NEW!! Web based VBA training course delivered by me. For details visit:
http://projectservertraining.com/learning/index.aspx

 

[Mike Glen]

Hi GLT,

Remember, if the tasks you deleted were not on the critical path, then the
project Duration will not change.

Mike Glen
Project MVP

 

[John]

Hi John,

Thanks for your reply - yes it was an arm-chair assesment (love that term
) - my whole issue here is that we deleted tasks (and updated other tasks
as completed) that was not meant to be in the project plan in the first
place, so I would have assumed the % complete would have gone up - which it
didnt.

So, I am thinking that the original work estimate like you said is too high.
But then I don't really care about the work estimate.

All i would like to focus on is how many tasks have been completed, and how
many more are left to go - at least that what my boss wants me to report on.

Cheers,
GLT.

GLT,
I see Mike and Rod put their two cents into the discussion. They both
made points I would have made. Let me just address a couple of lingering
items.

If the tasks you deleted did not have any progress, (i.e. future tasks
not yet started), then their removal will have absolutely no impact on
the % complete value.

Your statement about not caring about work estimate tells me that you
don't really have a project schedule, all you really have is a list of
tasks. If the only metric of interest is a count of completed tasks, why
not just list the tasks on a spreadsheet and use a binary progress
metric (i.e. done or not done). It's a quick and dirty approach but like
Rod said, it is only valid if all tasks are equivalent in complexity. If
they are not, then the simple binary metric will be very misleading. You
could add a complexity factor to each task and then use a weighted
approach. It's still a simplistic method but at least it addresses
significant differences in the amount of effort to complete each task.

John
Project MVP