Setting up Formula Driven Columns in Microsoft Project

[Joseph Kiely]

Currently, my organization uses the “% work completed†field in Microsoft
Project to calculate earned value. These percentages are multiplied against
a budgeted dollar value in our Earned Value Management System called COBRA to
financially represent how a program is performing in terms of cost and
schedule. Our organization also uses an integration feature in the COBRA
application that integrates project and COBRA in order to pull in the
baseline work identified in the schedule. (No problems here)

The COBRA tool also allows you to use the integration wizard to extract data
from the “remaining work†field which I refer to as an ETC (Estimate to
Complete). The problem is that when you make adjustments to the hours in the
“remaining work†field your “% work completed†changes which distorts your
schedule performance in COBRA. I believe that creating a custom field in
Project would solve my problems but I am not sure how to proceed. Basically,
I would like my percent completes to be calculated based upon my baseline
work since this should never change. This would allow me to make updates to
the remaining work without affecting the % completes I am claiming.

Also, I need to be able to have this custom field roll-up to the summary
task level. I experimented with using the “physical percent complete†field
instead of the “% work completed†field and noticed that it would not roll up
to the summary tasks.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Jim Aksel]

We use COBRA too. You need to use Physical%Complete. To do this properly,
you need to have a resrouce loaded and costed MS Project File. It's OK to
have "Resource1" at $1/hr assigned to every task if necessary. COBRA will
map to Physical%Complete.

There are three things that I routinely do to myself that keep the summary
tasks from rolling up. See if any of these help.

1. Tools/Options/Calculations (tab) click Earned Value... and select
Physical%Complete for the default measurement technique.
2. Every task must use the same measurement technique in order for the
rollup to work. Every task. So, open all your tasks to be sure everyone is
displayed. Select all of them, click on the Task Information icon, pull the
advanced tab, select Physical%Complete for EV. This gets me at least once
per week. An alternative is to insertthe EV type column and then populate
it. I'd do it the first way since I am lazy.
3. I forget to place a cost against the resources. $1/hr will work fine but
it assumes all resources cost/earn at the same rate.

If you already have a basline and are in progress, you are going to have
trouble re-mapping to COBRA. You will need to memorialize your
Work%Complete, Zero Out your EV and then re-establish. If you think about it
carefully, it can be done.

I am not sure a custom number field would help you. You are still trying to
multiply some measure of %Complete against a baseline value. That is what
Physical%Complete already does.
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Jim

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[Joseph Kiely]

Jim,

You are the man! This is going to significantly help my program track our
ETC/EAC. This is easy to do on a program that has not already been baselined
but I am struggling to figure out how to implement this with a schedule that
has already been baselined. In order for the physical percent complete to
work you follow the steps you provided me below and then you have to save the
baseline in order for it to begin rolling up to the summary tasks. I am
actually a COBRA admin not a planner but I know this copies your start /
finish dates and work into your baseline start / baseline finish dates and
baseline work. Since my schedule is already in progress and being statused
against the baseline this is undesirable. I have tried to copy my baseline
start & finish dates into baseline start 1 / baseline finish 1. Then I set
the baseline which will allow me to use physical percent complete because it
starts rolling up to the summary line items, however, I need my original
baseline dates. So I tried to save an interim plan and copy my “Baseline 1â€
into my Baseline which I thought worked but the physical percent complete
would no longer roll up to the summary tasks. Have you experienced this
problem before? Is their any way to implement this on an existing baseline
without a significant amount of work or am I out of luck?


You are the man! This is goign to significantly help my program track our
ETC/EAC. This is easy to do on a program that has not already been baselined
but I am struggling to figure out how to implement this with a schedule that
has already been baselined.