MS Project Tutorial 4 on Tracking Project Plan

Project Tutorial On How To Calculate & Report Percent Completion

I got several requests to publish a tutorial on how should a project plan should be tracked in most realistic way. This is more critical for a development work which follow water fall methods.

Regular tracking of software projects and reporting the aberrations in must for managing the project.

Top 3 reasons how ms project baseline tracking  

1.    To know whether all activities on schedule? If not what’s the estimated impact on critical path and overall budget.

2.    Are all resources engaged and delivering as per plan?

3.    To forecast impact of new CRs on schedule & cost.

Thought tracking of project plan depends on stakeholder needs but more detailed planning demands more work from resources. So, it’s necessary to optimize the tracking details. 

Normally, project manager reports percentage of completion, either at precise values or at increments such as 25, 50, 70, 75, or 100 percent. In this article, we’ll discuss various options to calculate % of work completed assuming task performer is responsible for baseline date.

(1)    % complete calculates based on activity duration.

I use this for fixed duration project. During discussion, I try to get remaining duration required to complete the task and allow MS Project to calculate the % of work completed. Concept of remaining duration for the pending work helps in better cost & time tracking.

(2)    % work complete calculated based on estimated work for the activity.

This calculation depends on task distribution per day. I normally use liner distribution so the formula for % of work calculation is

Expected % work complete= 100% (Expected work to date/ Expected total work)

(3)    % of physical work completed is another option if you do EVM (Earn Value Methodologies). This calculation considers budget at cost and total cost.

Another important tracking method is Schedule variation index which you can use to report RAG status. You should use ms project progress line and status date.You can add a column in your MS project plan to calculate SVI and put a flag against each activity.

Here is the formula for schedule variation index without any cost factor.

SVI = Calculated percent complete/ Expected percent complete

Next lesson on project tutorial , I will show how to customize and a formula to present RAG status against all summary activities.

 Related articles on project tutorial series

1. 10 Tips for MS Project 13 users 
2. Best Practices For Building & Tracking MS Project Plan 
3. MS Project Tutorial 3 - 15 tips to create a project schedule
4. Top 10 Best Practices for Making an IT Project Successful
5. Top 7 reasons why large IT projects fail
6. Microsoft Project tutorial on how to track completion of activity in MS Project plan. 
7. What are the necessary skills of a good IT project manager
8. How to manage project resource calendar in MS Project 13