Projected Completion Date Question

[JaredAn]

Hey everyone, thanks in advance for support! My team is currently 2 months into a Workfront implementation. Still a lot of bugs to work out from a "buy-in" perspective. My question is about Projected Completion Date for tasks and projects. From the get go of a project, the planned completion date can be thrown out the window for most of our projects. If the sourcing team takes 3 months longer than planned, we don't want the design team to be held to the Planned completion date of their tasks. So i'm thinking we track "projected completion date" for tasks and projects to take into account the lateness of tasks. However, as delays happen in design, i want those project completion dates to be shown as Late as they pass their expected duration. But the Project Completion Date will always updated to be today's date. Is there any way around this, having the system update the Project Completion Date to today if it is late? Thanks again. jandree@daymon.com

[EricLu2]

Hi: We use a baseline to represent the last approved project plan. Then, we update the project plan (current forecast) to reflect reality on a week-by-week basis. We can compare our current forecast to the baseline to see what the variance from the last approved plan might be. That way, we can always trust our Planned Completion Date. The projected completion date is based on the burn rate, essentially, which is driven from the percent complete and actuals entered into timesheets. We don’t communicate Projected dates, we use them to discover where people aren’t working on planned work like we think they should. Does that help at all? Eric

[JaredAn]

Hey Eric,

Thanks for the response. Unfortunately I don't think that solution will work for us. I'm looking for a solution that will give me a updated Project Completion date but also for that date to become late as it passes it's duration.

In the project template settings, i see some options for "Completion Mode" I've attached a picture below. Could these settings be part of the solution? I'm not sure what these settings effect.

Thanks.

jandree@daymon.com

[EricLu2]

Hi: Those settings determine whether the project is automatically moved to Complete status when all the tasks are 100% complete, and whether a parent task is automatically moved to Complete status when all of its children are 100% complete. We have Completion Mode set to manual and Summary Completion mode set to Automatic. Thanks, Eric