Track overall project progress

There are a few quick things that you can do to get a feel for the overall progress of a project. We’ll look at Percent Complete, Projected Dates, Condition and Progress Status, Open Issues, and the Condition Update column. All of these indicators work best when you have a well-planned project and your project team members are updating their assigned tasks on a regular basis. In the Project Header, you can see the Percent Complete of the project. This is calculated by the Percent Complete values of each of the project tasks, weighted by either the duration or the planned hours of each task. Now we’ll talk about dates. We’ll go to the Project Details screen. When you plan your project, you can give it a planned start date. Then Workfront calculates the planned completion date based mostly on your task durations and predecessors. It also calculates two more dates, the Projected Start Date and the Projected Completion Date. These are the dates Workfront is projecting that you will meet if everything keeps going on the present course. Right now, the planned and the projected completion dates are the same. But what if we change the planned start date to last week? Now the planned completion date is recalculated to come in a week earlier, but the projected completion date is still August 2nd. That’s because no one’s reported doing any work on the project the last week. So the project is in danger of finishing late unless we take some action. Notice that the condition is showing At Risk now, which means it’s running behind but it’s not late yet. And you can see that the projected date is only a week past our planned completion date, so we may still be able to catch up. But what if I change the planned start date to a few months ago? It now shows a condition of In Trouble, which means the project is late. The planned completion date is now in the past. Let’s talk a little more about the Project Condition field. The Summer Catalog project has been running for some time now. The Project Condition says it’s on target, but this field can be set manually, so how do we know if it’s really on target or if the project manager just forgot to change the condition? You can hover over the condition to find out. If you’re given the option to change the condition, that means it’s in manual mode. The mode setting can be changed in Project Details. If we change it to Progress Status, it will use the Calculated Progress Status field instead. If you hover over the Condition field now, you get a message saying this field is automatically calculated by the system. It means you’re in Progress Status mode. But even if the system we’re calculating the condition is on target, you may still be at risk. You need to keep an eye on Open Issues. This number tells you how many open issues there are in this project. Open issues could mean that there is more work to be done than was expected. Best practice is to review new issues right away. If you decide they need to be resolved in this project, you can convert them to a task and plan them into the timeline. Until new issues are understood, you won’t know if they present a risk to your project. Let’s look at a project list to see one of the best ways to know the overall progress of a project. Change the view to the real story. And take a look at the Condition Update column. This shows the current condition and the most recent project update comment made by the project owner. A popular practice is for the project manager to make a brief entry summarizing the project progress at the end of each week. The most recent post will appear in this column if you choose the real story view or create a custom view.