Updating Project Progress with Microsoft Project

hello everyone and welcome to this presentation on updating your project schedule so you may remember this slide from the presentation and here is the project update cycle so the very first thing we need to do is set the project status date we need to capture the update somehow update the project progress reschedule incomplete work and make any other necessary revisions so those are taken into consideration that we're going to be updating the schedule if we look at the who will update the schedule so we're going to do it that's why we're attending this session today right watching this video we're going to use a variety of methods I'm going to show you the three methods that's what we're going to concentrate on how often well this particular project managers been a little bit lazy but you should be doing it on a weekly basis or maybe an hourly basis or and worst case scenario monthly basis but as often as you can but try and keep it consistent and we're going to assume that we have received all our updates by whatever method we're going to use okay so we're just going to concentrate on the technical stuff for this video so we're going to do the project update cycle so let's switch back over to Microsoft Project alright so here we have our project I want to update it so the very first thing we need to do is set the status date so being that we're this week is the week of 222 I want to say that we've got updates for this project up to Friday of this week the pro team members will come to us and said yeah here's the updates for this week you know it's a let's pretend it's Friday afternoon or Monday Monday morning if next week okay regardless the project status date is the date the information in the schedule is valid too so to set this you go to the project ribbon and the status section of the project and you click on the status date and in here you will have this dialog and you can set the status date I'm going to set the status date to be 226 Friday of this week okay this wouldn't happen in the real world you can't be doing it in the future but we get the idea okay press okay you can see the status date that's the information the date of the information the schedule is valid to so important step that we do that first and you'll see why okay right so we're ready to track project progress but you can as you can see in here you know this project manager has been a little bit bad it's now two twenty three or two twenty four you know all this work has never been updated so we've got a lot of work to do let's get started so for task 1 using the first tracking method percent complete I'm just going to come in here and click task and just say this one's 100 percent complete alright simple easy that's the first tracking method it gives you very little insight into what happened you can see that the task is started and finished exactly when planned very unlikely right so very little insight using that method so if you remember back to the presentation I always recommend whenever you are updating using the percent complete method you at least put in there the actual start and the actual finish for that task to get to that I'm going to click on the View ribbon select the tables drop-down I'm going to select the tracking table this is here out-of-the-box ready to go okay and here we can see the actual start and the actual finish dates right here in the tracking table and I can change them so you can see send complete is 100 we did that already but I'm going to say that you know this particular task maybe it started a day later than we originally planned so I'm going to say you know it was scheduled for two three perhaps it started on Thursday to four see what's happened then it's pushed it out by day and we can see that the finish date has now been updated we're still a hundred percent complete and there we go we can see that so the next method I want to show you is the actual work and remaining work before I show you this method however this is the tracking table and I like to make a few adjustments this is the out-of-the-box tracking table but it's got some columns in it that I just really don't need for this particular tracking method so whichever method you're going to use if it's just percent complete you just only need to see these columns and obviously the task then fusing the actual work and remaining work where you're going to need some additional columns we have the actual work here and you insert the remaining work and then that should be good okay but what I don't need is the actual duration and remaining duration I'm not using that method that's a different method a slight variation on actual work and remaining work it's just it looks at duration as a whole because you're not capturing work effort you're just looking at the duration tasks we're going to set further and looking at the work effort so I'm gonna hide those two I'm actually in a hide physical percent complete because we're not doing earn value we can keep actual cross but I'm actually going to highlight remaining work and actual work and drag them over here like so actual work remaining work see the percent complete and the actual cost perhaps I'll put my percent complete over here so you can see I'm just clicking holding and dragging and moving things around so it shows me what I want to see okay so quite an important step here we've just rearranged the tracking table the this is how I like it for the actual work and remaining work tracking method the first thing you're going to do is you know maybe you want to put the percent complete maybe you don't you want to then put the actual start the actual finish and the actual work and remaining work perhaps you want to see the actual cost that's been incurred all right so we set up a table you can actually save this as a new table as well and keep it for all new project moving forward that's out of the scope of this video but have a look online for saving views and Microsoft Project there's lots of videos out there for that I now want to track using the actual work from any work worth method for task two I'm going to say that we have done task two here it is there was four hours scheduled we have done three I click away you can see all one hour left but we need another 8 hours so we've gone over budget on this one we can see on the Gantt chart compared to the baseline quite a longer task now the durations going up you can see our Microsoft Project is calculated the percent complete for me you can see that blue change highlighting again it's also got the actual start date as the planned stop ok we could update this at this time but I'm not going to do that this time all right next one task 3 well Mike came back to me and said he hasn't even started it yet like I'm going to do with you ok whatever we'll leave that one alone we'll figure that out later the tasks fall however Tom Henry came back to me and he said that he's done 10 hours but he has 35 remaining Wow this one's gone way over budget what I'm going to do to model that we've got remaining work 8 if I put in here 10 in the actual work he's going to think we're done to start with but we're not we can update the remaining work and say 35 so this is gonna jeopardize our schedules significantly oh maybe not though you can see that this mark this manually scheduled task has not shifted so this is why I manually scheduled tasks you can see it kind of wants to ship you see that hash lines and something's wrong here but it hasn't moved that's because you are responsible for the dates for those manually scheduled tasks this date should be pushed out into the future but it hasn't been because it's manual what you can do at this point is on other links so I can click on task 5 go to the task ribbon and say respect links like so and it pushes it out now that's basically we've just brought it back to being kind of somewhat Auto scheduled you know that's how it should be laid out according to the scheduling engine but as soon as things change again it will be so at this time I'm actually going to make this task auto schedule like so okay so we set the status date we've updated the project progress using the actual work or a mini work method I'll show you one more method so for task 3 1 alone I want to show you how to use the actual work per period method now this method takes quite a lot of effort and I don't typically recommend it to clients I usually say that if you're going to use this method you want to be using an enterprise solution if you need this much detail and you want to get your team members to be updating timesheets if you get them to do the timesheets these numbers that we're about to plug in will be dynamically imported from those time sheets into the schedule and they'll update the schedule for you ok so I'm gonna click on the tasks usage view the task usage view is what we call an assignment view ok this allows us to see assignment so I can see here task 3 I can see who's assigned I can see the number of hours work that we have scheduled for this task and I can see if I actually scroll to task on this one actually added that to my quick access toolbar the top of the screen and I love that scroll to task but you can access it from the task ribbon just here we can see the planned work one point six a six point seven five six one seven five six with some pride and think and so on and so forth I want to update the actual work well to do this I need to right click and say actual work so this is when the work was planned to start on the Tuesday I know that date I can actually hover over it to eleven well perhaps Tom Mike came back to me said well I've got it started on the Friday I didn't want to get started with an hour to go on on Thursday so let's say I did five actual hours there oh you can see what's happening it's said that we done five here let's push the task up what it actually did is on additional hours at the end of the project all right so we can also come in here and say oh yeah I did 6.75 on that day great and you can see the work is updated so this is the actual work per period method at any point you can also insert a new column called remaining work and you can up that for the task and the assignment and so that Mike's actually got sixteen hours left and you will see that that extra hour will be tacked on to the end and it's now well 2.5 as opposed to 1.5 the benefit of using this method although very manual it allows you to it will calculate Microsoft which it calculates the actual stand the actual finish for you based on the date that we first input work which would have been this Friday and once all the remaining work goes down to zero it will look at the date that that work was last entered for that task and that's the actual finish so if you're using the timesheets you know that's great because it's going to capture in actuals and it's gonna you're going to know exactly when it started exactly when it finished and how much work was done pretty cool just one other thing you can also see in here the baseline work which is another great reason to have that baseline open they're not on the wrong tasks let's go back down to task three and if we go here and I scroll to task that one we can see the baseline well you know we were supposed to start earlier we started it late so that's pretty cool all right so we captured some updates let's now go back to our Gantt chart view and we can see most of the work a lot of the work at least has been completed so that's good let's come in and make some other adjustments here so bearing in mind we're going to pretend that today is Friday this week all right 2:26 everything is started in the past but it hasn't really finished so what we need to do is the next step which is rescheduling incomplete work so to do this the first thing I'm going to do is look at where the problem lies in its task - that's the first problem in a chain of events that's kind of messed things up for us unfortunately so what I'm going to do is click on task to go to the project ribbon I'm going to click update project now what you'll notice is in this dialog these dates here to 26 and to 26 basically come from these status date that's why I like to set my status date first okay so with this dialog the up Jake update project you can use it to update project work but I don't like that I like to do it on a case by case basis use the tracking table and really take control of that okay but what I do like to use this dialog for is the second option to reschedule any income uncompleted work to start after a certain date so what I'm going to do is I'm going to say have it start after which is Friday of this week so it's going to start whenever the next working day is probably Monday if that's a working day it could be holiday I'm not sure right but it will start after this status date I will do that just with the selected tasks bearing in mind I look for the first task that was the problem task 1 is complete so we don't need to reschedule that it's done tasks to give us some problems there so for the selected task I'm going to reschedule it to start after the status date which is Friday of this week and press ok you can now see that these two tasks have been pushed out now there is another problem here task 4 if you remember was a start to start so this one is not really related to task 3 because they only have to start at the same time so you know with this start task is actually a bit of a problem now because this one is actually pushed down to the future so we're also going to have to push out tasks for to do that again a good example update project reschedule on completed work start after state is the default selected tasks press ok alright perfect that's it everything is now starting next week oh it's resuming next week interesting point Matt for resuming how'd it marks a project deal with this if I go back to the entry table you might expect to see some constraints here because my project is kind of over it in the scheduling engine no it didn't here's our one can straight down here because those tasks had started the update project dialogue does not use constraints what it actually does it sets a column for us remember I said everything amongst our project that you do is in a column somewhere this column is called resume so this is the date that we need to get started on that work again so Microsoft Project use that resume that you know we've got some tasks at main much how happens I can actually say let's resume it supposed to 229 will resume it on the first pushes it out slightly kind of not recommended to do that because you kind of want to have it scheduled as soon as possible which is those days that we're seeing now yeah that's pretty cool so it updates the resume column for us if a task is not started and we use the update project feature for example this one here task 5 has not started if I update the project for that particular task it would actually put a constraint on that task to push it out into the future which is why you kind of want to take the one in the first chain of events it's probably started in causing a problem push that one out and you know the natural dependencies will push this the the successor tasks out for you so use that tool as little as possible or as much as necessary and it will do that for you ok we have a slight problem if you remember back to our deadline or I said this project must be complete on a certain date and if you hover over my deadline it tells you ah we must be finished by four six sixteen well we're going past that date now because all these mess ups that we've had in the past and you can see we're way off track with the baseline we see that in the Gantt chart there we can also see in the indicators column this task goes past this deadline so that's only just recurred because it only appears in the indicators column once the task goes past its deadline before we are hunky-dory and we just saw the nice green arrow so we have some work to do what I want to do is quickly review what we were looking at in the PowerPoint so here we have our PowerPoint presentation and if you remember the three methods of getting our schedule back on track which were fast tracking crushing and discovering so running tasks in parallel assigning additional resources to tasks and kind of canceling tires to decrease the duration de scoping somehow okay those are the three methods let's go ahead and try and do these methods switch back to my powerpoint now okay here we go so the first thing I want to do is fast tracking running tasks in parallel so you know we've got some tasks being done here we need to save some time let's say that we want to run tasks four and five at the same time Tom Henry is working on them perhaps we need to assign some additional resources as well well we could redo that task but for the purpose of the demonstration we're going to double click on the link between the two tasks I'm going to say start to start it's kind of pushed it right back to the beginning but yeah that won't work will it let's undo that one what we're going to do is give it a negative lag so let's say there we go let's get we should probably do a little bit more in there put it back in a little bit more let's go for negative four days there we go so you see why that's shot back is because this one was pushed down to the future as soon as you make it ready to the start date if you link the two based on a start date well it started ages ago so we can start this one right now that's not the case so I use the negative lag to pull it back in all right so you kind of have to get clever using the different methods that I've shown you so that's one method fast-tracking another one crashing so to crash a task what you need to do is add additional resources these are all PMI terminal terms by the way okay so I'm going to click on task by and I'm going to bring up my task form for this one so if you want to do crashing typically you need to make a task effort driven because you're crashing you keeping the work the same but adding additional resources to save time and decrease the duration so I've checked the effort during chat box I worked on that we're working on that one now I'm going to now assign Mike watch what happens the duration 2.5 days we've saved we've saved two and a half days right there how are we looking in terms of ah ah yes we're back on track great one other thing when I was discovering and things like that my projects very linear but you may have multiple paths for your project if you come to the format ribbon well I'm in the task board need to click in the Gantt chart view format ribbon for the Gantt chart tools the former ribbon is a context-sensitive if you clicked in the task for you're looking at tasks form tools if you look in the Gantt chart your Gantt chart tools if you click on the critical tasks checkbox it shows you the critical path of your project so mine was very linear but yours may not be so if your desk oping or crashing fast tracking you only really want to be messing around with the critical path alright so let's see how that can help us where else can we save some time perhaps we need to bring it back a little bit more because we've got additional work to be doing and we know where there's some risk that we need to mitigate so the next thing we're going to do is desculpe in the third method we're probably all right right now but we'll have a go anyway okay so task 5 let's say we're gonna do scope now at the moment it's 2.5 duration with 40 hours work perhaps I'll tell them you need to get that done in a bit less time I'll give you two days obviously the works gone down that's one way to just go perhaps I'm just going to say well let's just not do that one at all mostly we'll just click delete on the keyboard right now not the right thing to do what you need to do at this point is click on the task ribbon and click inactivate what this does is cancel the task now this is a feature of Microsoft Project professional so if you have project standard you can't do this feature but here you go I'm just going click in activate and we're good you can now see that that task is ignored by the scheduling engine and we're saving you more time now pretty good ok so that's one way to get our schedule back on track we're now way ahead of schedule in terms of our where our fate well compared to our deadlines where we were with we're doing good which slightly ahead of the schedule in terms of the baseline you can see how the white milestone is just behind the gray milestone so we're looking all right there all right ok in fact no one way around the let's hover over I'm not sure yeah okay so the white one is the baseline so we're just slightly behind schedule good little tip now if you forget which is which hover over anything see this over over that baseline hover over the actual task it's a critical task hover over this and say summary task so yeah it's great to analyze it your schedule ok so that is it for getting your schedule back on track the next thing we need to do is any additional stuff so you know on a week-by-week basis we might want to add additional resources we might need to add new tasks in there somewhere you know maybe we need to task 8.5 I'm going to come in here put task 8.5 in here I'm going to give it a duration of 5 days and in that 5 days there's 40 hours of work I'm going to link these into my sequence events because we're going very linear because you can see at the moment task 8.5 is scheduled from the project start date what I want I want it to be done after 8:00 but before 9:00 so what I actually do is click on 8:00 not 8.5 and 9 break the links and relink and that brings that task and incorporates into us scheduled events ok great so that's any necessary revisions we might like to make you can make as many as you like at any point but on a week-by-week basis this is what you need to be doing let's briefly review our private point presentation ok so here is our project update cycle I have a nice separate slide for this so set the project status date capture the update somehow I give you a few options there meetings timesheets conference calls where ever the case may be update the project progress decide on the tracking method and go ahead and use that consistently that be percent complete go for it actually many work a bit better I show over period and a lot of work maybe use timesheets reschedule any incomplete work so use the update project feature really nice feature pushes things out using a resume feature so use the resume column to push stuff up if the task hasn't started ill on a constraint so just recap of that remember when you're doing that to use the selected tasks option don't push out everything by using the entire project option in there and then make any necessary revisions as you see fit that's it for this video I hope you enjoyed it and thank you very much and keep watching

Channel: Tom Henry

Views: 83,609

Rating: 4.8967743 out of 5

Keywords: updating project progress, microsoft Project, ms Project, Update schedule, project online, update project schedule

Id: nHIgocWrpAs

Length: 27min 11sec (1631 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 23 2016