Task Status Updates

Quick reference

• 00:04 With a baseline in place, we can start statusing our project.
• 00:08 And statusing our project essentially means talking to our teammates and
• 00:12 getting updates from them.
• 00:14 We made one change when we saved the baseline,
• 00:17 which was to change the duration of this Acquire lands task to ten days.
• 00:22 And you can see what it did.
• 00:24 It actually pushed out the entire project by ten days.
• 00:28 This is why statusing our project is so
• 00:30 important in getting the most detailed information we can from our team.
• 00:35 We wanna make sure that our project stays within our current plan and budget.
• 00:40 And if it doesn't, we need to take action.
• 00:42 I'm going to show you how to make use of Microsoft's statusing features
• 00:46 in this lesson.
• 00:48 As you may recall,
• 00:50 we have a number of different tables that display information in the Gantt chart.
• 00:55 So if we click the View tab, locate the Data section, and
• 00:59 choose the Tables pick list, we can choose Tracking.
• 01:03 And the Tracking view allows us to update our project progress.
• 01:08 So go ahead and choose Tracking, and
• 01:11 you'll see there's a number of fields that Microsoft recommends you fill out.
• 01:15 We're gonna make some changes here first.
• 01:18 Phys % Comp is a more advanced topic, so I'm going to hide this column.
• 01:23 So just right click on the column title and choose Hide Column.
• 01:27 Also remember,
• 01:28 we're tracking cost at the resource assignment level, not at the task level.
• 01:32 We're going to select both of these columns, Actual Cost and Actual Work.
• 01:37 Right click, and choose, Hide Column.
• 01:39 Finally we're going to expand the Task Name field,
• 01:45 so we have a better view as to what we're working with.
• 01:49 It is not that easy to just go and start entering Actual Finish dates and
• 01:54 Percent without knowing Our Plan Start and Plan Finish dates.
• 02:00 So let's go ahead and insert a few columns.
• 02:04 Let's go ahead and insert the column called Start and Finish.
• 02:17 And duration.
• 02:22 And let's move Percent Complete, so
• 02:25 it's over here, to the left of the task name.
• 02:30 So I'm clicking on the Percent Complete title, and
• 02:34 I'm dragging the column over here to the left of task name.
• 02:38 Okay, this makes everything a little bit easier to view now.
• 02:42 And I can see what I plan to start, when I plan to finish,
• 02:47 when I actually did and the duration and actual duration.
• 02:55 And you can just keep expanding these until you get the screen to look good
• 02:59 the way you want it to on your screen resolution.
• 03:03 Status in you project is as easy as just going through and asking your team members
• 03:08 to give you a percent complete, or the actual start date for a task.
• 03:13 So, here we have a task called Acquire land, and if I look over here to
• 03:18 the Get chart, I see the homeowner is associated with this task.
• 03:22 I'm gonna ask the homeowner how well they're progressing.
• 03:25 Let's say that it's past 12/1 already.
• 03:28 We're on Wednesday, it's 12/2.
• 03:30 Well, the homeowner might say it's 100% done.
• 03:34 So I'll just go ahead and type 100%.
• 03:36 And you can see that the Actual Start and Actual Finish
• 03:41 dates filled in with the start and finish dates I originally estimated.
• 03:47 That's because they didn't give me any kind of different dates so
• 03:52 Project filled that in for me.
• 03:55 Now I'm talking to the Create Architectural Design task
• 03:58 with the architect.
• 04:00 And the architect says well it was supposed to
• 04:04 start on 12/2/2015, but we actually got started on this on 12/7.
• 04:08 So I'll just go ahead and type 12/7/2015.
• 04:14 And notice that the start date changed to 12/7/2015 as well.
• 04:21 As I've said, you should never enter a date into the start field.
• 04:25 You should always let durations and predecessors address that date for you.
• 04:32 However, when you type an actual start or an actual finish date,
• 04:36 that's actually going to modify these dates, start and finish, and that's okay.
• 04:41 Because we're just mapping the tasks to what really happened in the schedule.
• 04:48 Okay, so they're going to tell us that they're about 25% complete.
• 04:54 So I'll go ahead and click the task tab, and
• 04:57 just point out you can click this 25% icon here rather than typing 25%.
• 05:03 So you can see there's a zero, 25, 50, 75 and 100.
• 05:07 It's a good idea to just start with these percentages and
• 05:11 not worry too much about hours right now.
• 05:14 I'll show you a few minor details around how you can start tracking hours
• 05:19 without becoming too complex with your project schedule in the next lesson.

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