Update of actual hours

[Nathalie]

I would like your advice on the update of actual hours and some help on
several issues I had.
I have a task with fixed duration and five people assigned.
I want to update thair actual hours. To do that, I update the project with
the status date as of today. The Actual work is automatically set as what was
planned.
Then, I update manually the actual hours for each resource in the task usage
view.
Sometimes, it happens that the end date is modified or the status date of %
complete is changed. For example today is 13th and my black line of progress
is modified and goes until the 6th.
I would like to know what I am doing wrong.
thanks
Nathalie

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Nathalie --

I would recommend that you stop updating the project through the Status
Date. The software is making an automatic calculation of Actual Work that
may or may
not be correct. Instead, you are definitely on the right path using the
Task Usage view. Are you tracking Actual Work on a daily basis? If so, you
can add greater accuracy to your updates by right-clicking in the timephased
grid (yellow/white timesheet-like grid) of the Task Usage view and then
selecting the Actual Work details. You can enter the Actual Work for each
resource on a daily basis.

However, please note that with a Fixed Duration task, you may see some
things that you don't like. For example, I have assigned a resource to work
40 hours on a Fixed Duration task at 100% Units. The software automatically
contours the planned Work at 8 hours per day over this 5-day Duration task.
At the end of the week, the resource reports to me that he only did 6 hours
of Actual Work each day on the task. If I enter 6 hours of Actual Work for
each day in the timephased grid, the software automatically reschedules the
2 hours of uncompleted work each day into the remaining days of the task.
On Friday, when I enter only 6 hours of Actual Work, there are now 10 hours
of uncompleted work remaining to be done by the resource. What do you
expect Microsoft Project to do in this situation? The default behavior of
the tool is to take all 10 hours of remaining Work and pile them into one
additional day of Duration. The task is now a 6-day Duration task, with 10
hours of Work scheduled on the sixth day. This is the default behavior of
the tool, and you cannot change it, so you need to know what the tool will
do when the planned Work cannot be completed within the limits of the
original Fixed Duration on the task.

Hope this helps.

 

[Nathalie]

Trevor,
thanks a lot for your help.
I did what you described on the tracking Gantt view with the tracking table.
I updated the Start date, the actual duration for the activities that had
started.
Something strange happened on the summary tasks. Even if all the tasks had
an actual duration in order to finish the 13 th of February, the summary task
progress date is the 16th of February.

For the next cycle of input of actuals, do I have to update the status date
first? Is the actual work already entered going to be modified? Could you
give me a step by step methodology to update actual on a project?

thanks
Nathalie

 

[JNB]

Hi Dale,

Regarding the default behavior of MSP after entering 6 hours of actual work
on the last day (Friday);
- How do we interpret that behavior in terms of work equation for a
fixed-duration task ?
- I guess it is now a slipped task. What do we need to do next to fix the
current
status of the task and resource ?
- Why do I get 5.63 days instead of 6 days when I enter actuals ?

Thanks in advance for any feedback.