Hi,

if you red my last post, you’ve notice that we are finished with the Planning phase, and we have saved Project plan, called Baseline.

Now, the Resources are working on their assignment and they should track (or you as a Project Manager should track) Task Progress.

How to do it in MS PROJECT 2010? There are several ways, and it depends on how much information can you get about your project task, and HOW MUCH TIME DO YOU OR YOUR RESOURCES HAVE!

First, and easiest way is to record a project “ON TRACK”.

In my example I have four tasks in my project:

Now suppose that you want to mark all your Tasks at 11.12.2011 “ON TRACK”. You can do it like this:

• First I will set up my status date on 11.12.2011:

• After that I will choose to make all Tasks ON TRACK:

and I will get:

As you can see, Task 1 and Task 2as market as Completed, because only this two task are scheduled to finish on (or before) status date which is 11.12.2011.

Another way to do the same thing is:

and I will get the same thing, because I choose Set 0 or 100% complete only, and Entire Project options:

Now suppose that I set Status date as 15.12.2011:

and after that I choose to update project on the same way but with Set 0 – 100% complete:

I will get:

You can see that Tasks 1,2, and 3 are completed, but Task 4 is partially completed, because I chose  Set 0 – 100% complete. If I choose Set 0 or 100% complete only, Task 4 will be intact, because these option marks “ON TRACK” only Tasks which are totally completed!

Another easy way to mark Task “ON TRACK” is to choose Percentage of completeness here:

I can choose between: 0%, 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100%. For my example let us suppose that the whole Project is finished 50%. I will select the Project Summary Task (Task 0) and click on the 50% Button:

and I will get:

As you can see Task1, Task2 and Task3 are completed 100%, and Task4 has marked as there is only 1 day of work accomplished on it.

Why? Simple, the whole Project has 12 days duration. And because I marked the whole Project as 50% finished, it means that the resources spent 6 days (50% of 12 days) on the Project. And since Task 1 has 1 day duration, Task 2 has 3 days duration, and Task 3 has 1 day duration, they are finished (Task1 + Task2 + Task3 = 5 days). The remaining 1 day from 6 days spent on the project is on Task4, as you can see on the picture above.

Those are the simplest ways of tracking Project progress. You should use it only when “everything is on time, and on schedule”, and you can estimate the progress in percentage.

But what If your tasks are started or finished earlier or latter, or you have spent  more or less time on them? You can track this as well. How? Read my next post on Thursday.

Until then,

Best regards!