Analyse a project for MI reporting

[Phil Monckton]

Do any of you have a tool or peice of VBA code that will look at a project,
count number of tasks, how many complete on time, how many complete late, how
many late against baseline, this kind of thing and give a general RAG status
of the project.

i am currently manageing 40-50 projects varying in size and complexity, and
have to report my gut feel on them all based on what the plan is telling me.

any help would be very welcome

regards

Phil

 

[John]

Do any of you have a tool or peice of VBA code that will look at a project,
count number of tasks, how many complete on time, how many complete late, how
many late against baseline, this kind of thing and give a general RAG status
of the project.

i am currently manageing 40-50 projects varying in size and complexity, and
have to report my gut feel on them all based on what the plan is telling me.

any help would be very welcome

regards

Phil

Phil,
Sorry if this posts multiple times. I didn't have my internet connection
active when I first hit "post".

I don't have code to do what you want but it would be pretty easy to
generate. However, I caution you that creating this type of "general
statistics" can be very misleading if the detail data is not also
reviewed. For example a file can show great general metrics if a ton of
"easy" or minor tasks are complete but the hard-core work is yet to be
completed or even started.

John
Project MVP

 

[Phil Monckton]

Agreed but the analysis points you to look more closer, i have several
buttons that allow quick analysis of slippage and new tasks, but not
something that looks at the plan in general.

Phil

 

[John]

Agreed but the analysis points you to look more closer, i have several
buttons that allow quick analysis of slippage and new tasks, but not
something that looks at the plan in general.

Phil

Phil,
It's great that you have other tools to perform a more detailed
analysis. My concern with "plan in general" type metrics is that they go
to upper management, where there often is no desire to "see the details".

John

 

[Jack Dahlgren]

This would be pretty simple to code.
You just need to open the files in a directory,
Open a text file
Check the tasks
Write to the text file.
Close the project file and go to the next one
close the text file.

I have sample code for writing to a text file here:
http://zo-d.com/blog/archives/progr...ing-writing-project-properties-to-a-file.html

To get the count of tasks you would use something like this:

Activeproject.tasks.count

Use variance to figure which are different from baseline.
then loop through the tasks and count them

dim NumOfLateTasks as integer
NumOfLateTasks = 0
for each task in activeproject.tasks
if not task is nothing then
if not task.summary then
if task.finish > task.baseline.finish then
NumOfLateTasks = NumOfLateTasks +1
End if
End if
End if
Dim PercentLateTasks as long
PercentLateTasks = 100 * NumOfLateTasks/Activeproject.tasks.count

Similar stuff for whatever statistics you want.

Check my site for other VBA examples and let me know if you need any more
help.
-Jack Dahlgren
http://zo-d.com/blog

 

[Rod Gill]

The other point is how do you report on the most important metric: Happy
Customer? Schedules are important, but not the most important data for
predicting and tracking project success. I favor traffic light reporting
against business deliverables and key stakeholder happiness, plus some basic
metrics from schedules.