Introduction to progress

Once your project is underway, you might want to record its progress at regular intervals. Recording progress ensures that your project is kept up to date and lets you see if work is progressing as planned or if delays are creeping in. It also ensures that you know how much work remains to be done to reach the project finish date.

When you update a project, you record the amount of progress that has been made to tasks and allocations within a certain period, known as a progress period. Each progress period has a report date; this is the date up to which you are reporting progress. When assigning progress to tasks and allocations, you select the progress period for which you are reporting progress. For example, you could show that in week 1, two days were completed on a 10 day task, and in week 2, four days were completed on the same task.

Progress appears along the top of tasks and allocations and it can be shaded according the appearance of the period in which the progress took place. In the following illustration, the task has been progressed in two progress periods (marked as green and blue) and approximately a third of the task remains to be completed:

Instead of using multiple progress periods, you could use a single progress period and keep changing the report date. This technique is simpler but does not allow you to use different colours for progress shading and progress lines.

There are two ways of calculating progress:

You should specify which method you want to use by clicking Duration percent complete or Overall percent complete radio button on the Progress tab of the Options dialog.

After marking progress within a project, you should reschedule the project to see whether the latest progress has affected the critical path and the project finish date. If the project finish date has changed, you might want to make some adjustments to the plan to get it back on track.

When you reschedule, you can choose whether or not to move uncompleted tasks in line with the report date of a progress period to make it clear what work remains to be done. For example, if you chose to do this after entering the first week's progress on the task above, the task would look like this (the green and blue lines represent the report dates of the progress periods):

If you chose to do this after adding the second week's progress, the task would look like this:

This enables you to see precisely when a task was carried out.