Track progress from the project timeline

Transcript

One of the best ways to track progress in your project is using percent complete and progress status. This project started a few days ago and is already running behind. Note the overall percent complete of 3.52% and the progress status of at risk. We can see that Megan was given 6 days to complete this first task, but after 4 days she’s still less than half done with it. Or is she? The project manager has asked workers in this project to update their status at the end of each day, and Megan hasn’t made her update for today yet. When she changes her percent complete to 60% and the project timeline is recalculated, by selecting the recalculate timeline option, the progress status changes to on target. At this stage, the small percent complete of the project may not be an easy to understand indicator of how the project is doing, but the progress status is. That’s why it’s a good idea to set the condition field on your project to progress status. You can do this in the project details. Just make sure the condition type is set to progress status. Doing this makes the condition field here and here reflect the progress status that Workfront calculates for you. You can also change it to manual and set the condition field yourself, but then you’re losing the benefit of the calculated progress status so easily visible. And you’ll have to constantly keep this updated manually. The timeline can recalculate automatically every night and every time the scope of the project changes, depending on settings made by your system administrator. If you make a small change like the percent complete on a task, you might want to recalculate the timeline using the option that we just used. Workers need to update percent complete on their individual tasks manually, since they are the ones that know their progress at the task level. Then Workfront uses this information to calculate percent complete at the parent task level and at the project level. Notice what happens when we change the percent complete of a few tasks. When the percent complete of a sub-task is updated by the worker, the parent task percent complete and the project percent complete are recalculated by Workfront. For greatest accuracy, the best practice is to keep task durations short and ask workers to update their status at the end of each workday.