Tracking plan on a weekly basis based on dates only ?

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    • #409610
      Mark Kirpalani
      Guest

      For this exercise I have added four hypothetical tasks to a WBS with a planned start/finish date & duration

      The reporting scenario required is as follows; we want to calculate and track week on week metrics for status reporting every Thursday

      Hypothetical Project start date is March 1st
      On March 2nd (1st Thursday for reporting), what is the plan vs actual – we also want to show next week’s actual predicted on March 9th, then 16th, then 23rd etc

      We then want to do that for every week going forward to the end of all tasks

      any suggestions on the easiest way to accomplish that ?
      we are using MS Project 2016

    • #409611
      Larry Christofaro
      Participant

      Mark, this is a great question that has many variations for answers. It’s kind of the holy grail of managing project schedules, and difficult to explain well enough in a forum post. I believe Dale Howard did a pretty good webinar on this not that long ago, but I couldn’t find it in my feeble attempt. I’ll try to give you a basic start if you’re willing to work out the particulars. I tend to update (and everyone has their favorite sequence of fields) each task using the following set of fields (in this order):
      Start: To indicate an estimated start date for an upcoming task
      Actual Start: The date a task actually starts
      Stop: This is the finish date of the active portion of a task. It would contain the Thursday of the status date if the task has started but not complete.
      Remaining duration: Estimate of what is remaining (after the status date)
      Resume: If a task is on hold until a future date

      The key is to enter them in the order above as the task progresses. There are a couple of gotchas that can get in the way (predecessors and the like) that can get in the way, but for the most part it works pretty well. I found that these fields work the best, give the best results, and relatively easy to use. Good luck…

    • #409641
      Sai Prasad
      Participant

      Mark – I have written a blog on this topic. https://bsaiprasad.wordpress.com/2014/09/30/how-to-calculate-planned-complete/. This blog is written with the requirement to calculate only planned % complete as on status date field (which is sent in Project tab). Your requirement is to besides (actual) % complete on the current date, you also want to know the planned % complete on the current date and planned % complete on a different date.

      So, follow the same instructions in that blog post. After pasting these formula in Number1 and Text1, replace [Status Date] with [Current Date]. Next set the Status Date in Project tab to next week Thursday. Now, insert a Number2 and Text2 field with the same formula in the blog that reads [Status Date].

      With these changes [Text1] will display the planned % complete on current date and [Text2] will display the planned % complete on status date.

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