Question & Answer: How do I indicate that a task that is in progress is going to take longer than estimated in Microsoft Project?
While it is easy to mark a task as complete or to indicate a percentage of completion in Microsoft Project, it may not be as obvious how do we mark a percentage of completion for a task and at the same time indicate that this task is going to take longer than expected–so that Microsoft Project recalculates the remaining tasks start dates and adjust the project schedule accordingly. This is one of the questions that comes up at our Microsoft Project Techniques workshops and which has an easy answer.
Indicating a percentage of completion and updating task during in Microsoft Project
First: Select the desired task
Second: From the Tools menu, select Tracking, and then Update Tasks:
Third: Instead of entering a percentage of completion, enter the actual duration that has been spent on this task already (let us say 3 days in this case) and the remaining duration to complete the task (let us say 4 days in this case):
In other words, this task, which was estimated to be a 5 day task, has already taken up 3 days, and it is expected to take 4 more days to complete–for a total of 7 days.
Once you press Ok to confirm your updates, Microsoft Project adjusts the schedule accordingly.
That easy!
Additional Resources
- The Lunch & Learn Webinar: Microsoft Project Tutorial taking place on Thursday June 3, 2010
- The Microsoft Project Techniques webinar taking place on June 21, 2010
Founder and principal of People-OntheGo, has more than fifteen years of experience in the software industry. Pierre has founded several companies including a financial software company in 1987 (Computer Trends, Inc.), an e-CRM company in 1995 (Imparto Software Corporation), raised several multi-million dollar funding rounds, and completed two successful acquisitions. In the last few years, Pierre's interest centered around bridging the gap between technology and people. He founded People-OntheGo to help corporate users manage e-mail and digital communication tools more effectively, and Digital-OntheGo to help organizations take full advantage of the new advances in digital video and web distribution, both part of the OntheGo Technologies L.L.C. Pierre holds a Master's degree in Engineering from the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, Michigan), and has completed several Executive Education programs at the Stanford Graduate School of Management (Stanford, California).
