Project Progress 

Purpose

You use the planning phase of your project to plan how you want your project to progress. However, errors in planning or unforeseen events may cause the project to vary from the plan.

The project objective will then only be achieved if project management identifies these variances early on and takes prompt action to correct them. To this end, project management requires constant access to current information about:

The state of the project at a particular time, as derived from actual data on costs, dates, and capacities.

The progress of the project towards achieving its goal, as of a particular time, compared with planning

How you expect your project do reach completion. If the actual course of the project varies from the plan at a particular point in time, you can use key dates and simultaneous schedule updates to forecast the project's further progress.

Neither costs, resources, nor dates may be viewed in isolation. You can only draw meaningful conclusions about the progress of your project when you can compare actual results with these values.

The Project System provides tools for effective project monitoring, control, and execution, as follows:

Progress analysis is the tool you use to determine planned and actual project progress values, and to compare the two sets of data. This enables you to identify cost and schedule variances early and take appropriate action.

For details, see Progress Analysis

This is an easy-to-use, effective process for monitoring your project schedule. To this end, the system evaluates the milestones relevant to project progress at different reporting times. In the graphical MTA chart you recognize trends and variances immediately.

See: Milestone Trend Analysis (MTA)

You can use this process to calculate the costs expected to occur between now and the end of the project, based on plan and actual values. The updated cost to complete calculation gives you a realistic forecast of the costs you can expect over the rest of the project. This method helps you decide whether and how to continue a project. The system calculates expected cost at completion (EAC) as well as the cost to complete (CTC).

See Project Cost Forecast .