Overview

Tracking Progress is used after you have completed the plan, or have completed sufficient iterations to reach an acceptable plan, and the project may be progressing. Now the important phase of regular monitoring and control begins. This process is important to help catch problems as early as possible, and thus minimize their impact on the successful completion of the project. The main steps for monitoring progress are:

• Saving a Baseline schedule, also known as a Target This schedule holds the dates against which progress is compared. The current project may be copied and used as a baseline or an existing project may be assigned as a baseline.

• Recording or marking-up progress as of a specific date, often titled the Data Date, Status Date, Update Date, Current Date and As-Of-Date.

• Updating or Statusing the schedule with Actual Start and Actual Finish dates where applicable, and adjusting the activity's Remaining Durations and Percent Completes.

• Scheduling and at the same time moving the Data Date to the new Data Date and recalculating all the activities dates.

• Comparing and Reporting actual progress against planned progress and revising the plan and schedule, if required.

Comparing the status of an activity against more than one baseline is useful; for example:

• The original plan, which could be Baseline 1, to see the slippage compared to the original plan.

• Last Period, which could be Baseline 2, to see the changes since the last update.

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