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Task Status Updates

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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.

Lesson versions

Multiple versions of this lesson are available, choose the appropriate version for you:

2013, 2019/365.

Exercise files

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Task Status Updates.mpp
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Task Status Updates - Completed.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.

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  • 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.

Lesson notes are only available for subscribers.

Create a Baseline
05m:33s
Resource Assignment Status Updates
04m:26s

PMI, PMP, CAPM and PMBOK are registered marks of the Project Management Institute, Inc.

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