Project Completion % Progress

A key component on any project is having the ability to review the progress and completion of a project. The progress bar displays the percentage completion of projects, enhancing visibility and control over project progress.

Beneficial for PMOs and project managers, by providing a clear metric to assess project health and make informed decisions based on real-time progress. It simplifies reporting and enhances the ability to meet project timelines and budget constraints.

This article will explain how the % progress is calculated with projects that have project schedule plans as well as how to update the % progress manually via the schedule, and projects with only start and ends dates.

Projects with a project schedule plan

For Projects with a Schedule: The completion percentage of a project is calculated based on the progress of the parent or top-level tasks. Parent tasks can either be:

• Auto-Calculated: The completion percentage of the parent task is automatically derived from the combined progress of its subtasks, ensuring that the parent task's completion accurately reflects the total progress of all underlying activities.
  
  Example, the Requirements and Design phase is the parent task which has auto-calc turned on.
  
  
  From the Gantt, the % complete field of the phase will be locked and the % complete will then be derived from its sub-tasks/children tasks.
  
  
   
• Manually Set: The completion percentage of the parent task is set manually but should accurately reflect the overall progress of the task and its subtasks.
  
  Example, the Procurement and Installation Workstream is the parent task, its % complete field is editable and is set manually to 50% and reflects its sub-tasks progress.
  
  
  
  

Note: For projects that do not have a schedule, if you want to set your project's % progress manually without using the project start & end dates. You can create a single schedule task on your Gantt and set the % progress from that task. Same method as the Manually Set option above but without having any sub-tasks. 

Projects without a project schedule plan

For Projects without a Schedule: In projects that don’t follow a structured schedule, the percentage complete is determined by the elapsed time from the project’s start date to its end date. As time progresses, the completion percentage increases proportionally. If a project does not have an end date, then the percentage complete will default to 0%.