Reporting Progress
From Clarizen
Overview
There are a number of ways you and other team members can report progress on work items in a project.
Team members (Resources) can either choose to update progress for their assigned work items by:
- updating Progress fields in Clarizen
- via Progress Update emails
- logging Time in Time Tracking retroactively ( Timesheets) or in realtime ( Stopwatch)
Note: To maximize efficiency, progress can be concurrently updated by project team members on several levels such as task level, milestone level, etc. When updating progress at any level, it is automatically aggregated to all relevant upper levels and progress impacted work items, which enables team members to capture an accurate picture of the project in real time.
How to Report Progress?
Depending on your company policy, progress can be updated by one of the following means - qualitative progress or quantitative progress (or both):
- Qualitative – reporting % completion, indicating the readiness of a work item
- Quantitative
- reporting Remaining and Actual effort (in the project properties window), indicating the amount of days/hours spent on a specific project as well as the amount of days/hours that are still required to accomplish the Work
- reporting hours via Timesheets (which can be set to update Actual Effort)
Please refer to “Task Completion Reporting Policy” section in the System Settings for more options for your organization.
Shared and Individual Reporting
Leaf Tasks (tasks that have no sub-tasks) can be reported on per individual resource or shared reporting amongst the task resource pool.
This setting can be accessed in the “Task Completion Reporting Policy” section within system settings, to be set on a global level, and can also be individually set in the Work Item Profile Card for individual tasks.
Updating Progress Report via Email
Progress Reporting emails are either sent automatically (according to set system settings) or may be sent manually from a selected work item.
Before Progress Reporting can be used, make sure you configure the relevant system settings.
The two types of tasks that are reported are:
- Current active tasks
- Pending active tasks that will be active by the next report sent
Once the email is sent, there is a system setting parameter defined which defines the number of validity days to which the email report form may be sent back for the system to update the progress of the tasks.
There may be a situation where when you are updating the progress of tasks that the system does not let you update.
These include:
- Progress report email has expired
- A new Progress Report email has already been sent to you
- You have already updated your progress
- Project data has been changed and no tasks require your attention
If progress reporting from a task is sent manually, then the user can only view their active tasks and not upcoming tasks.
Using the Progress Report Quick Update form, you can update your progress on the work items without actually having to log into the system. Updated information is entered to the system and the relevant projects are updated accordingly.
Updating your works' %Complete from a Progress Report email
Once you've received a Progress Report Email from Clarizen, select one of the two options:
- My Progress is according to Plan - if you click this link, the report that is detailed in the email is verified within the system. A screen is displayed that the progress according to the plan is updated successfully.
- Quick Update - opens a reporting form page where you can manually update tasks' progress.
If you choose to manually update, you can enter the % completed or the days of actual effort and remaining effort. The data that is entered is automatically adjusted in the work plan. For example if you entered remaining effort 10 days, the due date for that specific task is adjusted accordingly.
If there is more than one resource assigned on a task, then all resources are sent a Progress Report. The report is updated in a sequential order of those who update the report.
Relevant System Settings
For configuring System Settings related to progress reporting via emails see details in topic on Task Completion Reporting Policy.
The following conditions must be met before a Progress Report email is sent:
- System settings are set
- Every resource assigned to a work item where 'Email Allowed' is set will receive an progress report
- Sent to manager of a work item
If recipient is both a manager on a work item and also an assigned resource on a different work item, they will then receive one email with a summary of the progress report for all work items to which they are assigned.
The system updates the latest details.
Relation between Actual Effort, Work & % Completed
Actual Effort reported by resources is one of the possible ways that Actual Effort can exceed the estimated Work of the task. In this case the work item is internally flagged as "Overworked" to indicate that the work item is “over-budget” for its defined Work.
When Actual Effort is updated via reported Timesheet hours, the “overwork” situation can cause ambiguity (uncertainty) of the %Completeness. This status is indicated by setting the % Completeness Uncertain field to “TRUE”. Work items with this status won’t be transferred automatically to Completed state.
When % Completeness is Uncertain (i.e. the field is set to “TRUE”): 1. % Complete will display a “?” character (example: 100 (?)) 2. Remaining Effort, if it’s not manually set, will be shown in red and with a “?”character
How %Completed is Calculated
General Rules
- Hammock (Task, Project, Milestone) completeness is influenced by its direct children (sub-projects / sub-tasks)
- When weight (via Progress Impact) is defined for an object, the object's relative effort is not used for parent completeness calculations
- When children of a hammock don’t have Progress Impact weight defined, the calculation of the hammock's %Completed is according to their effort
- When all children of a hammock have defined Progress Impact weights, the % completeness of the parent is calculated according to those weights
- When a hammock has children that some have weights and some don’t have weights, the children with weights defined will be calculated by their weights and the children that don’t have weight defined will be calculated according to their effort and the relative weight
Relationship between %Completed and Time tracking reported Actual Effort
Even if users have reported time via Time Tracking, users can manually change %Completed for work item. In this case Actual Effort will not be changed by the manual modification of %Completed and will continue to use the timesheet entries as the basis for calculating the Actual Effort.
On Hold and Cancelled work items
- Reporting is not allowed on work items in “On Hold” and “Cancelled” states. User will have to change state to “Draft” or “Active” first. Stopwatches that were running prior to the change of State will still be allowed to report their time.
- Progress is not be calculated on entities in “On Hold” and “Cancelled” states.
Task completeness calculation
Task completeness can be reported in 2 ways:
- % Complete – when completeness is defined by a user
- Actual and remaining effort – completeness is automatically calculated by the formula:
Completeness = actual effort / (actual effort + remaining effort)*100 Example
- Actual effort = 5
- Remaining effort = 15
- Completeness = (5/(5+15))*100 = 25%
Weight calculation
When calculating the % complete of a hammock (a work item with sub-work items), the % complete is also influenced by the weight of the sub items. The weight is the amount of effort defined per work item (the Work field – see the Scheduling View).
- Weight default value = 100
- Weight manually set value will not be limited
- Calculated weight = weight value / total of all weights
Hammock calculations
Hammock completeness calculation is calculated as follows:
Completeness % of hammock = sum (completeness of child * its relative weight/ total weight)
Completeness of child can be its direct completeness (user defined for task or calculated on hammocks) or actual effort/total effort(user defined for tasks)
Relative weight has 3 scenarios
- Weight is manually defined: Calculation disregards effort and only calculates according to weight
- No weight defined and task has effort defined: weight of task = default weight *(task effort / total effort of tasks with no weight defined)
- No weight defined and task does not have effort defined: Calculation is using default weight (100)
Example:
Hammock has 6 children
- Child 1 - Completeness = 30, weight 50, (effort doesn’t matter)
- Child 2 - Completeness = 20, weight 150, (effort doesn’t matter)
- Child 3 - Completeness = 70, no weight, effort =5
- Child 4 - Completeness = 80, no weight, effort =10
- Child 5 - Completeness = 40, no weight, effort =15
- Child 6 - Completeness = 60, no weight, effort = 0
The Relative weight of children = • Child 1 = 50/600 = 1/12 • Child 2 = 150/600 = 1/4 • Child 3 = 300/600 (relative weight of all tasks with no weight defined) *5/30 (relative effort of all tasks with no weight defined) = 1/12 • Child 4 = 300/600 (relative weight of all tasks with no weight defined) *10/30 (relative effort of all tasks with no weight defined) = 1/6 • Child 5 = 300/600 (relative weight of all tasks with no weight defined) *15/30 (relative effort of all tasks with no weight defined) = 1/4 • Child 6 = 100/600 (default weight/total weight) = 1/6
% Completeness = (30*1/12) + (20*1/4) + (70*1/12) + (80*1/6) + (40*1/4) + (60*1/6) = 46.67
