explanation of status date

[lynne baker]

Hi all
Please forgive my ignorance - I'm embarrassed to call myself a project
manager sometimes!

Please would someone explain about "status date", about why I should
use it, and when, and when I shouldn't use it, and the effect of
rescheduling incomplete tasks from that date.
Many thanks

lynne

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Lynne --

The Status Date can be considered the last day of a reporting period. For
example, all actuals from team members were due last Friday at 5:00 PM.
Therefore, on Monday I would set my Status Date value to 2/6/04. The time
is set to 5:00 PM by default when you specify a Status Date. Once I have
set my Status Date, I can update actual progress for last week.

A couple of uses for the Status Date are:

1. The Status Date is used in the calculation of earned value.

2. The Status Date can also be used with the scheduling of progress and
remaining work when you use the Percent Complete method of tracking
progress. These scheduling options can be found in Tools - Options -
Calculation. They are the four options that deal with the use of Status
Date.

That's a little bit of information for you. Perhaps the others will have
some additional thoughts and ideas. Hope this helps.

 

[Gérard Ducouret]

Hello Lynne,

The Status Date is the date when progress data has been collected in the
field.
If everything is progressing well, every work on the left side of the Status
Date would be performed.
If that's the case, you can tell it to Project by the menu sequence :
Tools / Tracking / Update Project / OK (NB the Status Date on the top right
angle of the dialog box)

If your progress is late or if it's ahead, you have to tell it to Project
manually, task by task :
Tools / Tracking / Update Tasks... (for example)

If you need to use the Earned Value, note that the BCWP, and the ACWP are
calculated by Project at this Status Date ( compared with the baseline)

Hope this helps,

Gérard Ducouret

 

[lynne baker]

Part of my reason for asking is that one of our PMs updates her plans
as and when she get updates from the team (we're using PWA, Project
Pro 2002) and then the dates get shunted about all over the place.
Should she be updating the plans all in one go, rather than as and
when?
thanks
lynne

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Lynne --

What is your methodology for tracking progress? Do you use % Work Complete?
If so, do you ask your team members to report the Actual Start date and
Actual Finish date as well? Or do you use one of the two other methods for
tracking progress? Let us know.

 

[lynne baker]

Hi
we're using PWA, I've set the reporting method to be the third option

"Hours of work done per day or per week: Resources report the hours
worked on each task during each time period. "

and the 2nd option

"Resources should report their total hours worked for a week "


I have my own team report on a Friday afternoon, so that on Monday
monrings I can update my plan ready for a summary project meeting on
Monday afternoons.

But one of my colleagues just does it whenever she has the time and
finds that all her future dates get thrown about all over the
place...neither she nor I really knows why, but I read something about
status date and wondered if that were the reason why.

Again, as always, many thanks for your help

lynne

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Lynne --

If your colleague is using the same methology as you for tracking project
progress, then the Status Date would not be the source of her issues. I
would recommend that she carefully examine each set of updates from her team
members before updating them into the project, and then carefully examine
the results of the updates before saving the project plan. Thanks for the
clarification.