Project % Complete showing 0% when half of tasks marked Complete/100% | Community
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Level 4
October 15, 2018
Question

Project % Complete showing 0% when half of tasks marked Complete/100%

  • October 15, 2018
  • 11 replies
  • 1860 views

Has anyone run into a situation where you've completed a larger number of tasks within a project but, at the project lst level, the % Complete still shows 0%? Chris Watson KVH Industries, Inc.

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11 replies

Level 2
October 15, 2018
Hi Chris, I can't tell from your screen shot, but is it by chance that you don't have the child tasks under that first one? Cathy Glenn TRTA Marketing
cwatsonAuthor
Level 4
October 15, 2018
Hi Cathy, Sorry the image isn't more clear but the first image is of the Project Status as shown at the Program Level (i.e., seeing a list of all projects in the program and their status). It's for some confidential initiatives so I just grabbed the Status portion of the Project list entry. The second image is of the tasks within that project, showing that roughly 40% of them are 100% complete. I'm trying to understand why 40% of the tasks are done but the project itself still says 0% complete. Thanks, Chris Chris Watson KVH Industries, Inc.
cwatsonAuthor
Level 4
October 15, 2018

Here's a better image of the program with projects greyed out. You can see the one that's at 0%. Clicking into that project then shows the completed tasks at 100%. Chris Watson KVH Industries, Inc.

Level 10
October 16, 2018

There could be one of a few reasons:

  1. If the completed Tasks have zero in their Planned Hours. The % Complete is based on your percentage of Planned Hours completed.
  2. If the Project (under Edit Project) you have the Summary Completion Mode set to Manual (see attached)
  3. If the Project (under Edit Project) you have the Update Type set to Manual Only (see attached)

Let us know if it's not any of those three.

cwatsonAuthor
Level 4
October 16, 2018

Hi Vic,

Thanks for the suggestions. The tasks in question all have assigned hours though the duration is set to 0 days as the initial set of tasks were all taking place in sequence on the same day.

Our projects templates by default have the summary completion mode and update type set for "Automatic" and "Automatic and on Change" respectively.

It's odd as our other projects use the same template settings and track % complete for the project as a whole without incident.

Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore
Community Advisor
Community Advisor
October 16, 2018
Hi Chris, Perhaps a Project Actions > Recalculate Timeline will give the overall Percent Complete a nudge. Regards, Doug Doug Den Hoed - AtAppStore Got Skills? Lend a hand! https://community.workfront.com/participate/unanswered-threads
Level 3
October 16, 2018

Hi Chris,

Percent complete calculation is done based on the setting in Setup -> Project Preferences -> Projects . So if it's set to Duration in your instance (which I think is the case based on what you have said), then the percent complete will be 0 for the tasks unless the duration has some value and only the tasks that do have duration will affect the overall percent complete of the project. So, you might want to change this setting to Planned Hours if that's what your work is based on. Please note that the change will affect all the projects in the system.

October 16, 2018

Just from the initial image, understanding it's confidential, it looks like you don't have a parent task for the overall project. If everything is not indented from a parent task for the project then it won't show completion for the project like you want.

For instance, the project should look like:

  • Confidential Project
  • Phase 1
    • Phase 1 tasks, as many as you want
  • Phase 2
    • Phase 2 tasks, as many as you want

You can add any level of child tasks below "Confidential Project," but if "Confidential Project" isn't a true parent, then the timeline and progress will not calculate properly, from my understanding. Please correct me if I'm mistaken.

From the glimpse of the first screenshot, it looks like the "Confidential Project" could be at the same level as Phase 1 rather than having Phase 1 be a child task of the project. If that is the case, then the logic of calculating the overall project progress will not work.

Hope this helps!

Emma

ChrisMu
Level 2
October 16, 2018
I have run into the same problem at time. ion my case it was because the tasks were set to zero duration. Changing it to one day at minimum clears up the problem. Chris Mueller HLUS: Holdings
imgrund
Adobe Employee
Adobe Employee
October 17, 2018

Hi Emma,

Just so you know, you don't have to have that Confidential parent task to get the project's overall percent complete to work. We don't have on any of our projects.

I think the issue is that he has the percent complete based on duration and his tasks have 0 durations. We had the opposite problem in our early days were it was set to do percent complete by hours, but our people weren't doing planned hours yet.