Simplest way to approve time and update percent complete on projects

[amaaraba]

I am new to SN but have used many other Enterprise PPM tools.   I am a little confused on what is the simplest way for a resource to track time against a project task.   When the resource submits a timecard for project tasks and approve the timecard it's not updating the percent complete of the task.   What am I missing?

[Michael Fry1]

The Percent Complete field has reverse logic if you ask me. If you set the State to Closed Complete, nothing happens to the Percent Complete field, but if you change Percent Complete to 100, the State changes to Closed Complete. (Check Business Rule: Set State On Percentage Change)

Seems like a simple rule would do the trick. Something like: if State is Work in Process, Percent Complete is 50, and if State is Closed Complete, Percent Complete is 100.

[amaaraba]

So there is no way to have the % complete based on a comparison of the time entered and the estimated hours?

[Michael Fry1]

It doesn't come out of the box, but you could build a custom script to do that calculation and set the Percent Complete field.

[kellykaufmann]

As Michael Fry stated, the two are not related in the system. However, I don't think that would be a best practice to have tied. If a task is estimated to take 5 hours, having worked on it 2.5 hours doesn't necessarily mean it is 50% complete it just means half of the forecasted time has been used so far. As you know, estimations are an art and never exact and analysis of the variance between estimated and actuals is a helpful tool for future estimations. Of course, as Michael Fry indicated you COULD make this automatic but you would need strong business practices where people still manually update the % complete to reflect where they really are with progress of tasks.

As for easiest way to update...

- For % complete, one thing I always trained on is how to create reports and put them on their homepage - for example a report of all tasks assigned to that person with a start date up to the next week for a given project. Put this on their homepage and they can update the progress from that report on their homepage. You could also train on creating a VTB for a specific project for tasks assigned to that person with columns by task state. Then they could go into each task in the 'In progress' state for example and update the % complete (making sure to look at the ones not yet started that they were supposed to start).

- For timecards, here is a good discussion: Automate creating timecards .

Another helpful means would be to have the field for % complete for a given task on the time card, so they could update both at the same time. But the trick is to get a time card generated for all the tasks they should be working on. For that, see my comment at the bottom of that thread I linked to.

Hope this helps