Physical % complete behavior?

[Kris R.]

I'm confused about the Physical % complete field. The help says it is a
manually entered field, but for summary tasks, you cannot edit it, NOR does
it roll up. It's just alwasy 0% for a summary task.

For example:

NAME Phys % comp
===================================
RES02DEF 0%
--230kV oil 50%
--Proj mgmt 100%
--cable design 100%
--System Plan 100%
--Project Plan 25%

RES02DEF is the summary task, but I cannot edit the Physical % complete
field (like I can for its children), AND it's set to 0%, no matter what the
values of its children.

(1) Why can't I change it?
(2) And if it can't be changed, why doesn't it do something useful, like
roll up??

(Or is there something special I should do to make it roll up? I've tried
hitting the "calculate now" button, but it doesn't make a difference.)

Thanks,
Kris R.

 

[Steve House]

Each task should be a description of an observable physical activity that
produces a deliverable but a summary task simply rolls up the data on its
subtasks. In a real sense you can remove that summaries completely and the
project will still get done - they are just there as organizational
conveniences. Since there is no single deliverable for the summary task,
there really is no such thing as a "physical completion" that can be
observed and measured. You'll notice that % Complete, which refers to
duration and thus is actually a meaningful measure at the summary level,
rolls up just fine. Looking at your example you can see the pitfalls in
using physical complete as a measure of project progress. How can Project
Management be 100% physical complete when the project is still underway?
The manager has ongoing responsibilty for the duration of the project. And
"230kV oil" certainly sounds like a material resource that may be used in a
task but that name is not a description of an activity, hence not a task, so
what does 50% Physical Complete mean in that context? The meaning of
physical complete is just too loosey-goosey, IMHO. If I have to lay a 100m
walkway and I've done 50m, physical complete is pretty straight forward to
measure. But if an engineer is designing an engine, what does "50% physcial
complete" refer to? The front half? The crankcase? Half the drawings done?
In general, I think of % physical complete as really being little more than
a notes field and not a reliable estimate of project progress. After all,
the job is to bring in the project on-time and under-budget. % Physical
Complete measures neither time nor budget and while interesting to know, is
not directly related to whether your project plan is successful.

 

[Kris R.]

Thank you for your thoughtful response. But, I should have been a bit
clearer. My example was NOT real world - it was just something I was playing
with to try to understand the rollup behavior of Pysical % complete. The
tasks are just made up, and I set several tasks to 100% complete just to see
what (if anything) would happen in the summary. Of course, nothing
happened - it's still 0%.

I am just curious as to why this field shows 0% for a summary task. I should
think it should rollup (perhaps as an average) or at least let you manually
set it for summaries. But it does neither. So, it seems that for summary
tasks this field is worse than useless.

For reasons too complex to go into here, we cannot use the % complete field,
as one would normally do. Suffice it to say that in this case, this is not a
"normal" project plan. We just want to track the "completeness" of each
task, and of the summary tasks. It is looking like we'll have to use a
custom field, I guess, and make it behave as we want.

Thanks,
Kris R.

 

[JackD]

Thank you for your thoughtful response. But, I should have been a bit
clearer. My example was NOT real world - it was just something I was playing
with to try to understand the rollup behavior of Pysical % complete. The
tasks are just made up, and I set several tasks to 100% complete just to see
what (if anything) would happen in the summary. Of course, nothing
happened - it's still 0%.

I am just curious as to why this field shows 0% for a summary task. I should
think it should rollup (perhaps as an average) or at least let you manually
set it for summaries. But it does neither. So, it seems that for summary
tasks this field is worse than useless.

For reasons too complex to go into here, we cannot use the % complete field,
as one would normally do. Suffice it to say that in this case, this is not a
"normal" project plan. We just want to track the "completeness" of each
task, and of the summary tasks. It is looking like we'll have to use a
custom field, I guess, and make it behave as we want.

Thanks,
Kris R.

Yes, the behavior of the field is puzzling. I would expect it to roll up
too, but my guess is that this would have some impact on the calculation of
earned value.

In the microsoft.public.project.developer group there was a recent
discussion about code which would summarize the values (see post titled Sum
at summary code) which would help you get a summary value for Physical
Percent Complete.

An alternative is to use a number field and it to calculate and then use a
sum or average for it's value.

-Jack

 

[Kris R.]

Thanks, Jack.

I think we'll probably end up using a custom number field.

Ya learn something new about Project every day, eh?

Thanks,
Kris

 

[JackD]

No, that is % work complete (where work is counted in hours). Physical
percent complete is a measure of how much work is physically complete
(examples are bricks laid, miles of road paved, lines coded etc.) It should
be something measurable. Physical % complete is important for Earned Value,
but project lets you choose % complete if you wish. In either case, summary
values are not strictly necessary, but would be a nice addition.

-Jack

For my opinion physical completion is dealing with amount of working

hours. I think that this item is the fundamental for Earned Value Analysis.

 

[Mark]

Ok, then Steve. How 'bout just an answer to the question.
Maybe like: Why doesn't it roll up. How do you get it to
roll up. What field should one use instead.

Mark

 

[JackD]

This is indeed a mystery...

-Jack

Ok, then Steve. How 'bout just an answer to the question.
Maybe like: Why doesn't it roll up. How do you get it to
roll up. What field should one use instead.

Mark

 

[Steve House]

Fair enough question. Like in my metaphysics classes when we debated why
does a triangle have three sides? So why doesn't it roll up? Because
Microsoft made it that way! <LOL> As to what led them to do it that way,
you have to ask Microsoft on that one, I'm not privy to their reasoning. My
educated guess, and it's only a guess, is that it wouldn't produce
meaningful information if it did and could even be misleading. My logic:
We have a summary task that has 5 subtasks. Each subtask produces a
different deliverable. We have finished 25% of the first one, 40% of the
second, the third is done, the fourth is 50% done and the fifth is 75% done.
What would a meaningful rollup be? An average, a weighted average? What
numbers can we use to calculate the roll'ed-up percentage? If we look at %
Complete or % Work Complete a rollup makes sense - we need to do a total of
100 man-hours on all the tasks in the group and we've done 60 or we expect
to take 15 days for the package and we're 10 days into it, for examples.
But if I'm building a car and we're 50% done on the frame, 100% done on the
transmission, haven't started the suspension yet, 25% done on the engine,
and 75% done on the styling does that mean the car is 50% done? I just
don't see that average number "50%" as having any signifigance in monitoring
the progress towards completing our new car. It's an interesting number but
it's just a number. As I said before, since our *management* problem is to
finish on time and in budget, metrics that monitor performance against time
(duration, % complete) and performance against budget (work, % work
complete) are much more useful because they actually mean something. %
Physical Complete doesn't tell us when we'll have our new car or how much it
will cost.

--
Steve House [MVP]
MS Project Trainer/Consultant
Visit http://www.mvps.org/project/faqs.htm for the FAQs