Speaker 1: Hey and welcome back. So it's exciting right now because we're finished our planning, our project planning. We've established our baselines, obviously we sent them off, got them approved and everything else, and now our project is underway. And so we're gonna have to start looking at monitoring the project and controlling it, making sure that it stays on track and everything else. So the first step to doing that is how do we track our project progress in Microsoft Project. And so that's what we're going to try to cover today. I'm going to really just run through like a series of examples on how we would update different tasks depending on what occurred during the progress. And from that of course we're going to go on to analyze it and do look at our variants and and look at our earned value in subsequent tutorials. But so right now we have our project open on the screen. It's our bathroom renovation. We've established our baseline. So if you remember if I pop over to the tracking Gantt, you can see the the baseline that lines up. There's no variation because we haven't tracked any progress in our project yet. But that's what we're going to do today. So we're going to start to see variation from what we had planned and what we actually accomplished. So I'm just going to go back to my Gantt chart. And so we're gonna do some updates. Now in this particular project, it's a fairly short project, and we've decided that we're going to do a status update once a week at the end of the day on Wednesday. And so we haven't done one yet. You can see the current data shown by the green vertical line right here. So we have our green vertical line going down there. And you know, we're a week and a half, two weeks, we're almost halfway through the project, but we haven't issued a status update yet. So I'm going to go back and I'm going to do the status update for the last week on the Wednesday. And then I'm going to do the status update for this week, effective the Wednesday of this week. And that will give us lots of opportunity to show different examples and nuances of what might go on with various tasks. So the first thing I need to do is to set the status date. And so if we go to the project task, or project tab, and we come over here, we see we have our status date. And so I'm going to set the status date for the date at which I'm doing my update. And so in this case, this would have been the update that we did last week. So I'm going to choose the 19th. And I say OK. And you see I get the status update line coming down vertical on my Gantt chart. Now you wouldn't necessarily get that, because by default in the grid lines it's turned off. Now when we went and did our template, you know, preferences, and saved it to our template, we turned it on. And then I subsequently went on and turned it on in my other Gantt chart views. So if you didn't do that, you're going to have to go to grid lines and turn it on. I'll leave a link up here at the top to go back to that earlier video where we showed how to do that. And you certainly want to be able to see that status update when you're doing your updates. So there's a couple things we need to do. So typically when I'm doing the update, so this is the entry screen. And normally what I would want to do is to have it on the tracking screen. And so I've brought up the tracking screen here. But there's a couple bits of information which I think are missing from the default layout of this. So the first thing I'm going to do, I'm going to introduce a couple columns. So I'm going to insert a column in the first one and I'm going to add our indicator column. And, of course, we know it doesn't really have to be that wide, nice and short, because as we do our tracking, it's going to start to change our schedule and it's possible that we're going to have some issues that the indicator column is going to give us warning to. So I like to have the indicator column showing pretty much all the time when I'm doing important work. And then right here we're going to insert another column and I'm going to insert the duration. Because sometimes doing our updates to get actual starts and finishes is just as easy by making changes to the duration. And so now we have our duration column filled in here. So now we're going to go through and we're going to start to update our individual tasks. So you see right off the bat, so our status date, keep, you know, think of your status date as what date is it now. And I have to update everything up until now. It should be, it's probably recent but in the past, so that you have full visibility as to the status of your project as of that date. And so we have really three tasks which should have started by that status date. And so we're going to have to, as a minimum, deal with those specific tasks. And so I'm really going to work my way down. So when we look at finalized plans, so that's where the designer is coming in finalizing the plan for our project. And unfortunately, in this case, the designer was a little bit slow, had some challenges, we didn't get feedback right away. And so that day kind of disappeared and it went into a second day. So it started on time, so that's important to know. But it really just took twice as long with twice as much work. And so the easiest thing for us to do is to change the duration to two days. And you see it updates the task, it extends it out a second day. It becomes critical because now it's the same as the demolition task. And it goes out there. Now, so after that two days though, it was all finished. So I'm going to bring up my task tab, and this is probably going to stay up there for the rest of this video. Because it's complete, I can just go over here and press 100% complete. And we see it takes this line and it shows your progress line. And now I've made mine black because it's nice strike it bold and I see that that task is finished. It's also no longer marked as critical because tasks that are finished and in the past can't be on your critical path because they're done. They're behind you. So that's really the first task and that's kind of the simplest way of updating things. Now if we look back at our sheet over here, we see that the actual start, actual finish are now filled in. Our percentage complete is filled in. And if we had our costs here, we would actually have actual costs. So we see our actual costs are actually now established in there. But we'll look at costs and those other things in a little bit. So that's great. So there's the the first task. Let's move on to the next one. So our demolition. So this one, kind of an interesting one because we actually got access to the site a little bit early. We actually got to start our project really a day early. We were a little bit concerned that that particular task was going to go long. And so the actual start date is a day sooner. And we'll just move it a day sooner and you see it updates itself. But at the same time, unfortunately, our laborer was only available to work on it half the time. So there was some other emergency work that needed to be done. So they could only invest about 50% of each day into the task. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to open up my resource, assign resources. I'm going to go in here. So we're still on our demolition. And instead of the laborer working full-time, we're going to bring them down to half-time on this particular task. And that has the effect of extending it out and making it take twice as long, as if it was effort-driven. And to that end, we get this warning over here. And it says, do you want to, by default it offers, change the duration but keep the amount of work the same. And work didn't change but it's going to take longer because we have fewer resources. Or we could do the opposite, which is change the amount of work but keep the duration the same. So it, by default, shows what we wanted to accomplish. And so we're going to accept that. And so even though we got started a day sooner, it actually took us a day longer. And so with that done, that's reflective of what we saw on that particular task. And so we're going to mark it complete. I'm going to do that by going back and just pressing the 100% and complete for our task. So now we go down to look at our stud walls. And we see that, you know, as of the status date, they were supposed to be, you know, half done. Right? It's a two-day task. We're one day into it. And so that's pretty much what we expected. It started on time and it seems to be tracking on progress or making progress as per. So we're just going to go up here. We're going to take advantage of this button, mark on track, which basically is going to say, as of the status date, everything is on track as per the plan for that particular task. And we see that the Gantt chart updates with the status bar showing 50% complete halfway through and finishing at the status date. And so that would have been our update for that first week, having updated a handful of tasks, the funny little things happening with each one. And so we're going to carry on. We're going to do, we're going to reset our status date. We're going to set it to the second week. We're going to take care of those tasks in the second week. And then we're going to go look at some of the variation and everything else and see what the outputs are because we're now tracking our tasks relative to that baseline. So let's reset the status date. So we're at the project. Go to our status date. Drop down. Instead of the 19th, it's now the 26th. We say OK. And so it goes to the end of the day on the Wednesday. And we see it now has moved over one week. We're going to start where we left off. We're going to pick up on the stud wall. So when we started this period, they were half done. And everything went without any hiccups and all the way to the end. And so we can just go back to our task tab. And if we mark it on track, it's going to just complete it because that's to the left of our status date. And so we're happy with that. And we're ready to look at our plumbing. So the plumbing went particularly well. We had planned or estimated three days. Our plumber found that things went exceptionally well. Very few hiccups. And he's actually able to complete the task a little bit early. So it finished. It started on the date indicated there. But it's going to come in at two days. So all we have to do is change the duration and step out. And that's what we're going to end up with once we mark it as complete. And so we do that. We say 100% complete. And our plumbing is done. Now you notice every time I update or move something, of course, everything behind it gets rescheduled based on the predecessors or constraints and everything, the leveling delays and all of that, that we've already chosen for the project. And so where one thing finishes late, obviously the things that come behind it are going to have to start late. And so those are the types of things that we're going to have to keep an eye on. So I'm going to ignore our other rough ins. They went fine. But I know that there was a challenge with the drywall. And of course, you recall when we were doing our resource leveling, the drywall was a particularly troublesome little task. And so unfortunately, our finisher, and you recall, we only have one finisher in our pool, he fell sick and he wasn't able to start the project on schedule. Now, I do know that he started yesterday, which is the date after the status date. So we're good. I'm going to have to reschedule this to start on the Thursday due to that illness. So I'm just going to go up to the move tab on our task tab. And when I go down, the easiest one for me to do, because I know it's going to start right after the status date, is I'll say incomplete parts to the status date. And you'll see it enters this constraint. We see the icon for the constraint over here says this task has a start no earlier than. That's not, you know, we don't normally like a lot of constraints, but that's not an issue because that's as of the status date. And so it's not going to affect future changes. And it pushes, we see we now have this void of work happening these last couple days because the drywaller was not able to get on the project due to illness. Now, what's really important, and you have to keep your eye out of this, remember I added the indicator column? Well, look what happened when we delayed the start of our drywall, is all of a sudden we now have task over, or resource over allocations. And we see it all coming down here in these few tasks. And those are the same tasks we had to manage when we did the resource leveling. And this is going to happen because other projects are, they're all interdependent. And when one change is going to affect the other changes. And so we're going to have to go back into our resource leveling and fix whatever is causing this resource allocation and update our schedule moving forward. Now, before I go and do that, I just want to take care of those last two tasks, the rough ins here, and show you a little trick. So if I choose the entire project and I say mark on track, so anything that isn't already updated that's to the left of the status bar, when I choose mark on track, it will mark them as a hundred percent as per the plan that they had at that time. And so we're happy with that. Our status is up to date, but we're not happy because we have these resource over allocations that need to be fixed. Otherwise, we know that our schedule moving forward isn't going to work out. So let's see if we can't go and do that really quickly. And to do that, I'm just going to go back down, back to my leveling Gantt. You'll recall that. Let's make it go to view, stretch it out so we can see the entire project. And of course, this is the area that we're working. Remember, these are the leveling delays that we introduced when we were doing our initial resource leveling. And so when this got delayed, of course, this had been delayed to start after the drywall was finished, and that's what allowed it all to work out. And so I think what I need to do is I just need to increase this leveling delay by the, what is it, a couple days, two, three days, that to bring it to the end. Let's see what we can do. So I'm going to go to my radiant floor. And if I bring it out seven days so that it starts after the drywall, then all of my indicators, all of my resource over allocation indicators have disappeared. And this is actually the logic that we had come up with when we did our initial resource leveling. So once again, we have a schedule that is able to be completed moving forward. So we're happy with that. And I'm just going to pop back to our Gantt chart. And so that's really our second update. But so what? So let's go have a quick look at some of the information that we can now use to our advantage. Of course, as we're going through all of this, we've got to be asking ourselves, so why is it delayed? So to that end, for example, the drywall, we now see that it's happening much later. It's very reasonable that I would want to open up the task information, go to the notes tab, and, you know, write a comment as to why it's starting so late. Because I'm not, you know, a complex project. I'm not going to remember all these details later on. And you can say, you know, late start due to employee illness. And so you will be able to understand it. And we see that now we have a note on the task. So let's see what we can do. So if I go to my sheet and I bring up my costs, let's open this up a little bit so we can get a better feel for what we're looking at. And so now we see all of our tasks. Of course, we can see what the baseline cost was. So that's what we were planning to spend. And the variance, of course, is, you know, whether it's over or under budget. And so, for example, you know, right now, as far as our plan, our estimate at completion, if you will, so our baseline was expecting this project to cost, you know, $17,700. And we're coming in, you know, $18,500. So there's a variance of $864. That's because we went over budget. Some of our tasks took longer. Those were based on work resources. Those work resources get paid by the hour. And so when the task went longer, we had to pay them for that extra time. And so it adjusted the time. Now, if we ended up paying or, you know, either a contract that went over budget, or, you know, our estimates for materials were low, and we, or vice versa, they were high, we spent less, we would actually have to input that information as well, into our actual cost for each of the tasks, so that we would get that variance correct. And so we're now starting to get really good information. You can see where we underspent on some tasks. Down here in the plumbing, remember, it went two days instead of three. We overspent on other tasks. And that's where we're going to have to start making decisions and adjusting things moving forward. You know, right now we see that we have a delay. So let's see that. Let's bring up the variance. And so if we look at the variance, and so this is looking at your start and finish, that's your actual start and finish, or plan start and finish versus the baseline start and finish. And it gives you your variance for the start and variance for the finish. And so the overall project is going to finish two days late. And if we're okay with that, then that's great. We can carry on and just accept that late finish. If we're not happy with that, now we're going to have to start looking at the tasks that remain within our project, and perhaps considering options to accelerate our project and get it back on schedule. But that's for a later video. So there's one more thing that I want to show you before we cut out of here. And that really is our tracking Gantt. And so I'm just going to open it up now. We've seen it, we've seen our tracking Gantt before, but not since we've started to update our project. Remember, this was all aligned, everything all fit together and they were one on top of the other. But now we can start to see how that variation is being visually displayed in our tracking Gantt. Remember that we remember that our baseline is the dark lines that are in the bottom half of each of our task areas. And the colored line is the actual now start and finish for each of our individual tasks. And we can see where we've had slippage and we see where we've gotten ahead of schedule and behind schedule. And so as we've gone further into our project, now we're, you know, falling behind by a couple days, which is ultimately leading to a two day delay at the end of our project. And so the tracking Gantt can be particularly informative when it comes to understanding your time constraints with respect to variation from the plan. So I hope that was interesting for you. So we've got a lot of information. Now we're going to have to start to use it. So we've got a couple of videos coming up. We're going to look at earned value and show how Microsoft Project is able to present earned value metrics for reporting on our progress of our project, whether we're ahead of schedule, whether we're on budget or not, as well as what are our options to crash our project? We've fallen behind by a couple days now. And while that may be acceptable in some circumstances, in other circumstances, it's not. So we want to look at maybe looking at our projects and bringing this plan back in line so that we finish when we originally scheduled our plan to finish or on budget, whereas we're falling behind budget. So there's lots of things to consider and we need to have a couple more videos to do that. So we're almost done. This project is almost one for the books, but not quite. We've got a couple more lessons left to do. So I hope you'll join me for that and we'll see you shortly.