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About this lesson
Updating task status is an important process a project manager should follow. You will get updates from your team and update the project progress.
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2013, 2019/365.
Exercise files
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Task Status Updates.mpp.mpp443.5 KB Task Status Updates - Completed.mpp.mpp
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Quick reference
Task Status Updates
Updating task status is an important process a project manager should follow. You will get updates from your team and update the project progress.
Steps
To update the status for your project, you should minimally update the following fields:
- % complete.
- Duration.
You may also want to update the actual start and actual finish dates. To update resources, use the details split view.
Login to download- 00:04 With a baseline in place, we can start statusing our project.
- 00:08 And statusing our project essentially means talking to our team members and
- 00:13 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 land task to 10 days.
- 00:22 And you can see what it did, it actually pushed out the entire project by 10 days.
- 00:28 This is why statusing our project is so important and
- 00:31 getting the most detailed information we can from our team.
- 00:35 We want to make sure that our project stays within our current plan and
- 00:39 budget, and if it doesn't, we need to take action.
- 00:42 I'm going to show you how to make use of Microsoft statusing and
- 00:46 features in this lesson.
- 00:48 As you may recall,
- 00:49 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 picklist, 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.
- 01:10 And you'll see there's a number of fields that Microsoft recommends you fill out.
- 01:15 We're going to make some changes here first.
- 01:18 Physical percent complete is a more advanced topic.
- 01:21 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 we're tracking costs at the resource assignment level,
- 01:31 not at the task level.
- 01:32 So we're going to select both of these columns actual cost and actual work.
- 01:37 Right-click and choose Hide Column.
- 01:41 Finally, we're going to expand the task name field so
- 01:45 we have a better views to what we're working with.
- 01:49 It's not that easy to just go and start entering actual finish dates and
- 01:54 percent complete without knowing our planned start and planned finish dates.
- 02:00 So let's go ahead and insert a few columns.
- 02:03 Let's go ahead and insert the column called start,
- 02:09 And finish, And
- 02:15 duration and let's move percent complete.
- 02:20 So it's over here to the left of the task name.
- 02:25 So I'm clicking on the percent complete title, and
- 02:29 I'm dragging the column over here to the left of task name.
- 02:34 Okay, this makes everything a little bit easier to view now and
- 02:40 I can see what I plan to start, what I plan to finish,
- 02:45 when I actually did and the duration and actual duration.
- 02:50 And you can just keep expanding these until you get the screen to look good
- 02:55 the way you want it to on your screen resolution.
- 02:58 Satisfying your project is as easy as just going through and asking your team
- 03:03 members to give you a percent complete, or the actual start date for a task.
- 03:09 So, here we have a task called Acquire land and if I look over here to
- 03:13 the Gantt chart, I see the homeowner is associated with this task.
- 03:18 I'm going to ask the homeowner how well they're progressing.
- 03:21 Let's say that it's past 12 one already, we're on Wednesday.
- 03:24 It's 12 2, well, the homeowner might say it's 100% done.
- 03:29 So I'll just go ahead and type 100% and you can see that the actual start and
- 03:35 actual finish dates filled in with the start and
- 03:39 finish dates I originally estimated.
- 03:42 That's because they didn't give me any kind of different dates.
- 03:46 So project filled that in for me.
- 03:50 Now I'm talking to the Create architectural design task with
- 03:54 the architect.
- 03:55 And the architect says, well, it was supposed to start on 12/2/2015.
- 04:02 But you know, we actually got started on this on 12/7.
- 04:05 So I'll just go ahead and type 12/7/2015.
- 04:10 And notice that the start date changed to 12/7/2015 as well.
- 04:15 As I've said you should never enter a date into the start field.
- 04:21 You should always let durations and predecessors address that date for you.
- 04:26 However, when you type an actual start or an actual finish date,
- 04:30 that's actually going to modify these dates start and finish.
- 04:35 And that's okay because we're just mapping the tasks
- 04:40 to what really happened in the schedule.
- 04:43 Okay, so they're going to tell us that they're about 25% complete.
- 04:49 So I'll go ahead and click the Task tab and just point out,
- 04:53 you can click this 25% icon here, rather than typing 25%.
- 04:58 So you can see there's zero 25, 50, 75 and 100.
- 05:02 It's a good idea to just start with these percentages and
- 05:06 not worry too much about hours right now.
- 05:09 I'll show you a few minor details around how you can
- 05:14 start tracking hours without becoming too complex
- 05:20 with your project schedule in the next lesson.
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