Progress periods

A progress period is a particular time slice during which progress is reported. For example, you might set up a progress period for each month of the year and have each progress period displayed in a different colour. You could set up a hierarchy of progress periods. For example, within each monthly progress period you could create a progress period for each week in that month, or within the Development progress period you might have subordinate progress periods for individual development teams so that each team can report their progress separately.

When you create a progress period, by default the report date is set to today's date because Asta Powerproject assumes that you want to report progress to date. If you want to report progress to another date, change the report date to the appropriate date. If you are setting up progress periods in advance, for example for the whole year or the whole project duration, you will need to specify the appropriate report date for each progress period.

If you want to prevent users from marking progress against tasks and allocations using certain progress periods, you can 'lock' such progress periods to prevent their use. For example, you may want to lock historic progress periods, or future progress periods that have been entered into a project but that should not yet be used.

If you use multiple progress periods, it is important to update the progress entry period - ie the progress period that is used by default when marking progress - each week or month before you report progress, to ensure that progress is reported using the correct progress period. If you forget to update the progress entry period before reporting progress, progress will be reported against the wrong progress period, making it difficult to ascertain when tasks were carried out. You can update the progress entry period by right-clicking a progress period in the project view and selecting Progress Entry Period.

You can edit the properties of a progress period by editing options on the Progress Period Properties dialog. To access help for the Progress Period Properties dialog, press F1 while viewing the dialog.