Work and Duration Estimates vs. Actuals?

[DPD]

I’m a project manager on an eLearning development team.

We have created standard schedules in Microsoft Project 2003. These
correspond to the various types of courses we develop, and are intended to be
reusable templates. We tend to create the same types of courses over and
over, with minor variations. So it is helpful to have standard schedules in
place to use as a starting point for each project.

Since we are engaged in repeatable processes, we would like to track project
data to increase the accuracy of our schedules over time. In particular we
are interested in the Work and Duration assigned to each development task.
At the end of a project we want to be able to compare the estimated Work and
Duration to the actual Work and Duration for each task.

What is the best approach for comparing estimates vs. actuals using
Microsoft Project? We currently track actual task completion dates and
actual Work hours outside of Project, and manually compare these to the
original estimates in our project schedules. Is there any way to log these
actuals in Project and then automate the comparison?

Thanks.

 

[vanita]

Hi

MS Project has good facility to compare actual progress of time as well as
work done with the estimates.

First after planning the project, save your plans as targets/baseline. Go to
Tools > Tracking > save baseline.

Then open your schedule in Tracking Gantt view and to get the relevant
columns, open the relevant Tables.
Go to View > Table > Tracking to input actual data for time progress and
actual work done for each activity.
Go to View > Table > Work to compare actual work with estimated and the
variance.
Go to View > Table > Variance to compare variance with respect to time.
Tracking Gantt would also show this variance in the graphical format.

I hope it helps.
Vanita

 

[DPD]

Thank you, that sounds good. I will try that.

Hi

MS Project has good facility to compare actual progress of time as well as
work done with the estimates.

First after planning the project, save your plans as targets/baseline. Go to
Tools > Tracking > save baseline.

Then open your schedule in Tracking Gantt view and to get the relevant
columns, open the relevant Tables.
Go to View > Table > Tracking to input actual data for time progress and
actual work done for each activity.
Go to View > Table > Work to compare actual work with estimated and the
variance.
Go to View > Table > Variance to compare variance with respect to time.
Tracking Gantt would also show this variance in the graphical format.

I hope it helps.
Vanita

 

[vanita]

Good luck

Vanita

Thank you, that sounds good. I will try that.