Reality Check: What kind of Condition are you in?

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

My apologies: that title is a bit of a teaser.

Especially late on a Friday.

During a pandemic.

But I digress...

I am trying decide whether to change the default behavior of the Schedule KPI on our data-drive one page Project Status Report solution. For fun, I'll set it up as a courtroom drama.

DOUG, FOR THE DEFENCE:

"This is an important edge case (and a very juicy topic), which has to do with Project Condition and Condition Type at the Project level."

"Depending on the Condition Type (Manual or Progress Schedule), the Project Condition (shown at the top right of a Project header) might not be the same as the Project Progress Status (which is automatic). As below (from an anonymous client environment…nothing like Real Data to tell the story…), when 'Manual' is set, it creates (in my opinion) a ticking time bomb (yellow) where the Condition on the Project happens to match the Progress Status at the moment, but could easily and without noticing falsely report (red) a Condition that is different from the Progress Schedule (commonly referred to in the business by some as 'BS')."

"With the intention of avoiding such situations (and in fact highlighting them), our Project Status Report (currently) uses the automatic Progress Status to drive the Schedule KPI (green)."

REALITY, FOR THE PROSECUTION:

"PMs quickly observe that if they set a Project's Condition Type to Progress Status, their Projects appear as At Risk or Late almost immediately, even without tasks. That behavior causes confusion for the PM, is deflating, inaccurate, and leads to ignore and/or distrust the Project Condition. The amount of detailed task level work required to keep the Project Status on track (especially when the PM 'knows' it is on track) is simply not worth the effort. Instead, PMs can simply switch the Condition Type to Manual, and periodically review and adjust the Condition as and when they see fit."

(NOTE: the preceding is based upon highly relevant expert testimonial obtained serendipitously earlier this afternoon)

SO! FOR YOU, AS JUDGE, JURY, AND EXECUTIONER:

Would you recommend Schedule KPI remain based upon the automatic Progress Status, or instead, be switched to drive off the Condition Type, thereby allowing for a manual Condition to be set?

Regards,

Doug

[AnthonyIm]

For my previous company, we had too many people abusing the On Target manual approach so I actually had an API call go every night to change it to Automatic. A lot of the excuses we were given is that the project is on hold pending the client, and so we told them to put the project in an On Hold status. The excuse was that the project was a request queue and so we have a special status called Request Queue so that it isn't included in any of our behind/late reporting.

Now with that said, we do tend to ignore At Risk progress status as that seems a little trigger happy to us. But by the time it gets to Behind, it is important something is updated/corrected.

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Well. This is long overdue.

I am pleased to confirm that to keep it consistent with Workfront, we have upgraded our Project Status Report logic as follows:

// conditionType = MN (Manual) or PG (Progress Status)

// condition (Manual) = IT (In Trouble), AR (At Risk), or ON (On Target)

// progressStatus = LT (Late), BH (Behind), RK (At Risk), or ON (On Time)

IF(conditionType = 'MN'

,IF(condition = 'IT'

, 'Red'

,IF(condition = 'ON'

, 'Green'

, 'Yellow'

)

)

,IF(progressStatus = 'LT'

, 'Red'

,IF(progressStatus = 'ON'

, 'Green'

, 'Yellow'

)

)

)

Accordingly:

- those “Manual” Condition Types with ON (On Target) Condition show as Green, even when, according to their Progress Status, they are LT (Late)

- those “Progress Status” Condition Types with LT (Late) Progress Status show as Red, which logically matches their IT (In Trouble) Condition

Also:

- we also upgraded the logic of the Overall KPI to consider only those KPIs that are marked as “Show” (as below, noting that I set Baseline and Resourcing to not Show)

- the “My Logo” is (now) drawn from the NWE > Setup > Main Menu Logo (if it exists), then the Classic > Setup > Top Navigation (if it exists), else our AtAppStore logo, as a default

- you can export to pdf, doc, xls, tiff, and PowerPoint

For more information (including installation instructions), check out the updates to our Project Status Report.

Regards,

Doug