Chris BlytheProject Management Consultant| Hawksview ConsultingNelson, New Zealand
I work for a local government organisation which has low project and program management maturity (I'd say level 1-2 ish). I have a program board that is asking for quite sophisticated reporting which I think is beyond our capability at the moment. However, to show willing I'm trying to find a way to meet their request.
A prior PM had set up a burndown style report showing the budget forecast and actuals against a target % complete and actual % complete. The % complete is largely based on 'are you on track or not' estimates rather than output completion. I've implented Project for Web and have asked the PMs to use a standard template, and have used Power BI to pull through summarised project start and end dates, and % complete information. The % complete is a bit variable as it is based on tasks ticked off in the project for web plan, and you need to game it a bit to make the programme Gantt show correct completion bars. I'm conscious PMs are using a mix of task and deliverables in the project plan and wonder if I ask them to ensure the deliverables are captured as line items so we can pull the data into PBI. We don't want to create a monster and we're not ready (or willing) to move to solutions like Jira or Monday as a projects solutions isn't a high priority on our dev horizon. I need to stay with the Microsoft stack where possible.
Most of our projects are waterfall implementations with some Agile projects run in DevOps, and some hybrid projects.
Any suggestions, links to templates or techniques that could help us develop a simple way to show % complete? thanks Saving Changes...
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Sergio Luis ConteHelping to create solutions for everyone| Worldwide based OrganizationsBuenos Aires, Argentina
In my previous work, in the situation you describe, we use MS Project and we make some customizations on it using visual basic to create, in the same project file, something like a "command board" using traffic light for each activity to show state on progress, risk and cost. We used MS Project for all type of approaches we use (traditional, agile, hybrid) and all type of life cycles we used for those approach. Something obvious but the key is to ask to stakeholders what they like to know about the initiative (project + product) Saving Changes...
The bigger issue will be to get consistent evaluation of % complete, especially for activities which don't lend themselves to independent verification of progress. A safer bet might be to use 0/100 reporting for work items which is consistent with adaptive progress reporting (i.e. done or not done) - of course this will require that work is decomposed to a manageable level of detail.
I would suggest an approach similar to Kiron which is reporting 50/100. 50% when a work item is started and 50% when completed. Gaming the numbers typically means they're a lagging indicator so you always look behind up until the day you complete on time. Your statement about tasks vs. deliverables leads me to believe the deliverables are larger so there is a bigger lag. 50/100 Is a simple way to address that with less tweaking to make the total % look right which is also a real pain.
I would be careful about consistency with tasks vs. deliverables. If a deliverable has many tasks, you don't want to double count completion. Sometimes they might have to be broken down into more manageable components to track performance. If I put a milestone on my progress reports that is 2 months out and nothing in between, it raises questions about what my team is doing for 2 months. Saving Changes...
