Hi everybody, my name is Charu Behl and I am a consultant at EPMA. Today, I'm going
to talk about various methods to update your schedule using "Microsoft Project 2013." Basically,
there are three methods to update your project progress and the method you choose to update
depends on the nature of work being performed in your organization.
The very first method I am going to explain is called "Percent Complete Method." It is
an estimated ratio of actual work performed versus total amount of work to be completed.
To do that the very first step that I would do is I would right click and insert a column
called Percent Complete column. Once I do that, I would go under the View ribbon and
under the Table's drop down I would select the Tracking Table.
Here you would see the two columns called "The Actual Start" and "The Actual Finish."
A lot of time what happens is that due to the schedule slippage your actual start date
is different from what you had planned earlier, and you want to make sure that the task A
is reported on time. For example in this task instead of starting on the 10/06 schedule
start date, it starts on 10/13 and you see what happens. Microsoft Project automatically
pushes out the schedule by a week and once I know my actual start date, I can actually
go back to my entry table and select the task that I want to update.
Under the Task ribbon and under the Schedule section, I can see all these bars varying
from 0% to 100%. Once I mark my project task as 100% complete, there is this right or check
mark that appears in the indicator section showing that the task is 100% complete, and
one very interesting thing that you would want to see is that once the task is complete
the actual finish date is automatically populated as the scheduled finish date.
The second method is called "The Actual Work and Remaining Work Method." It is a measure
of total actual work hours performed to date and the estimated number of work that is remaining.
Now again, to update Task B I would want to make sure that my actual start date is correct
assuming that it started as planned. I would go under the View ribbon and under my tables,
I will select the work table.
In this table, you would see these two columns called as "The Actual Work and The Remaining
Work" column. To update Task B, you see that the scheduled work or the planned work was
for 96 hours and the actual work that has been done till now is 0% that means zero hours
and remaining is 96 hours of work.
Once I mark this task as 50% complete, you see what happens, remaining is 48 and actual
is 48 as well and once I mark it as 100, the actual is 96% and the remaining is 0%. This
method is a little better than the Percent Complete Method because it actually gives
manager the flexibility to put in the actual number of hours.
For example, the number of hours that were actually put into this task were more than
say 96 hours, so what happens if I enter 104 hours? You see that again, the scheduling
engine makes pay for 104 hours and the schedule is pushed out by a day.
The third method is called "The Actual Work Per Period", and it is a measure of actual
work performed during each time period which may vary from a week to a day to a month depending
on your organization and the estimated number of work hours remaining. To do that I would
again go under the View section and under the Table drop down menu, I would select the
Work and now under the View, I would select my Task Usage View. So now, you see on the
right hand side, how my task is divided on the basis of day. So now, the manager or the
scheduler has the ability to break it down to the number of days and there is an increased
granularity to the whole process.
For Task C, I would insert, I would right click and see Actual Work. Now, I can actually
see where my task starts right here and now on Monday, I suppose my resource works as
planned and you see how everything changes. What if, on the next day instead of eight
hours my resource only works for six hours? You see how the actual is automatically updated
to six hours and the planned is updated to six hours and the remaining two hours get
scheduled once this task is over. This is again a very flexible method that a manager
can use to update his or her schedule.
Keep watching out for more videos and quick tips. You can also visit our website. I hope
you enjoyed the video. Good-bye for now.