Project Task % Complete: how is it really calculated, and can it be changed?

[Nora Wainwright]

Per the Planned Task documentation, percent complete is described as being calculated based on planned effort and actual effort for an individual planned task. And as far as I have found, there is nothing documented for how percent complete rolls up to the parent based on subtasks.

Here is what we've experienced, at least in Jakarta:

• On an individual task, neither planned nor actual effort have any effect on percent complete. It doesn't seem to be calculated by anything other than what the user enters.
• When rolling up to a parent task, percent complete appears to be a function of total planned duration of all subtasks. For example, if one subtask is 100% complete and 10 days and a planned duration of 10 days, and another task is 0% complete with a planned duration of 10 days, the parent task calculates 50% complete.

Is this intended, and is there any documentation out there that I'm missing that explains this?

Also, is there any way to modify the rollup calculation, so it uses effort instead of duration?

[rogerburns]

We are struggling with this calculation, as well, and it would be great to have an official response here.  Other community forum posts indicate that milestones and key milestones are not factored, no matter their duration. 

[Balaji39 · Accepted solution]

Hi Nora and Roger,

We acknowledge the problem with the milestones not being factored in for the % Complete calculation. We are working on fixing the same.

Currently, the % Complete of the parent task is derived using the Planned duration as observed and we do not factor the planned or actual effort. In case of a sub-task, the % Complete is editable and require the user to input the value manually.

I will work with the documentation team to have this documented.

Thanks,
Balaji

[surya123]

Hi Balaji,

We see that percent complete on the Project is showing more than 100%. Can you help me how I can debug this and fix the issue. Unsure what causes the percentage more than 100.

Thanks

Surya

[jwilcox]

 Is there a way to change the calculation to effort based?

Are you saying that a sub-task does not update based on duration in this case?  So the potential could be that a script could update the sub-task % complete field based on a system calculation of effort?  Is this manual entry on the top level task or at lower levels?