Microsoft Project Tutorial Part 15 – Reporting progress a more in detail

In part 14 of this tutorial, I covered the basic principle for reporting progress, so you need to grasp this chapter before moving on to this part.

When work does not follow duration

Have you ever worked on a task where the actual work does not follow the progress of the duration. Or in other words: have you ever been in a situation where most of the work is spent on the last part of the task?

If you use the default settings of Microsoft Project, you can use % Complete to specify how you’ve progressed and if you change the value, Actual Work and Actual Duration is changed. But if you want to change these values independent of each other, you can do so. First you need to remove the link between these values. This is accomplished by changing a setting.

Choose Tools–>Options–>Calculation. Deselect Updating Task status Updates Resource Status:

Now you can insert the field % Work Complete and change these values independent of each other:

When different resources work with different pace

But this is probably not what you really have in mind. The most value for this setting can be done when different resources on a task work with different pace. To be able to track this you can for example view Gantt chart and then select Window–>Split. Right Click the grey area of the form and select Resource Work. If you’ve disabled the link between % Complete and % Work Complete you can using this form update progress for different resources on a specific task.

In the example below, we can see that originally two resources were set on the task (since the Baseline Work is 0 for one of the resources). The first resource is almost done with the task and the last resource is done. But we’ve added a new resource which has not started.

When you need to track progress over time

If you need to know when resources spent time on the different tasks you can also select to work in the Resource Usage View or the Task Usage View. If you right click in the chart part you can select to add the field Actual Work. Here you can enter actual work on all assignment rows (white). I also often include the field Remaining Work in the table part so I can see how much time remains of current plan. Observe that you can on both places also choose to view the Baseline Work to see the original plan.

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