Hi,

I’ve got very good question from one of my Blog Readers: “How can I do to update the task as 100% but without changing work hours automatically? Because I want to know that my team is more efficient than expected.”

Basically we are speaking about Work, and Actual work in MS PROJECT 2016! What is problem here. For example, if you need 40 hours for Task, and you finish it in 32 hours, you want that those 40 hours of Work remains unchanged, but % Complete, and % work Complete to be 100%. Well, this is not possible, but there is a solution in which you can see that team is more efficient than expected.

I will create Simple Project, with one Task 5 days Duration, and I will put 40 hours in work field:

Now I am going to create John as a Resource and I will assign him to the Task:

and:

Notice that I’ve used Task Usage View in the picture above.

Now I am going to save this as a plan, or Baseline:

and:

‚

OK! Now let’s say that John has spent 32 hours on the Task and the Task is finished. I will use Task  Usage View, and click on John under the Task:

And I will get:

So, as you can see Actual Work and Work are equal. But this does not make comparison impossible. I will now use Work Table, and I will get:

and:

As you can see, Variance is –8 hours, and this shows that real work was 8 hours less then planned. You can also add some Custom field to see, for example, that efficiency is Baseline / Actual * 100%, so in this Case it will be 40/32 * 100 = 125%, etc.

To conclude when you change Actual work field, Work field is also changed. If Task is finished 100% then Remaining work is 0 hrs. BUT! If you save the Baseline before you put any Actuals, you can get Efficiency if you compare Actual work with Baseline Work field.

Regards