UPDATING WITH PROGRESS INFORMATION

TIME NOW

The first action to be taken is to update Time Now. Time Now is the date at which our progress information is relevant to. If we collected progress information last Friday and we are using the computer to update on Monday, our Time Now is the date of last Friday. To set Time Now:

Click Edit in main menu. Click Subproject. Click Edit Header.

Enter the Time Now date and click OK.

PROGRESS

You can specify the following types of progress information:

1. An Actual Start date for an activity that has started together with:

2. A Percentage completion (i.e. how much has been done) or

3. A Time to complete (i.e. what duration is left) or

4. An Anticipated Completion date. i.e. a date after Time Now.

5. An Actual Completion date for an activity that has finished.

In addition, for an activity in progress, you can specify whether work remaining is continuing from Time Now or whether work has stopped. This is a neat but very effective way of dealing with activities worked out of sequence. In the real world of projects it is unlikely that activities are carried out in the exact sequence of the initial ideal plan. You will probably have a situation resembling this:

In PLANTRAC-OUTLOOK you do not have to change your logic to deal with work done out of sequence to arrive at a correct schedule. In PLANTRAC-OUTLOOK you report what has been done and PLANTRAC-OUTLOOK takes care of your logic and schedule. Also remember that PLANTRAC-OUTLOOK can provide, through the Report Generator, documents known as Turnround columns. This enables you to provide, say to each department, a list of just their activities together with columns which can be completed by them. You can enter progress information by any input method by editing the activity. Here we will use the Spreadsheet.

Click Spreadsheet Icon.

A Spreadsheet will display for progress information to be entered. An example is shown below: