Reporting progress of a project against a date in the custom form

[LouiseRe2]

We currently have a report that shows the 'Condition' of a project. However this is based on progress against the Project Planned Completion Date which is not the date we need to track progress against. The date we need to track progress against is the Go Live Date which is a field in the project level custom form. Do you know how we could manipulate the report to do this?

[EricLu2]

HI: We have an attribute called “Standard Milestone”. It is like a Milestone (out of the box WorkFront attribute), only more versatile. I have a report that picks up all tasks in a project plan that have a standard milestone of “Go-Live”. From there, we can show the planned completion date of the go live task, the promised completion date (another custom attribute), and the projected completion date. I also have that in a Gantt chart, so that we can see all of the projects that have a go live event each month. We looked at it in January and saw too many go live events at the end of March and so moved some go lives out to spread out the risk. Does that help? Eric

[LouiseRe2]

Hi Eric,

Thanks for the response and although it makes sense, we don't use milestones to mark the go live date so this wouldn't work for us.

Thanks

Lou

[EricLu2]

Hi: How do you know which task is a go-live task? How is it marked or tagged? Tell me how you know a task is a go-live event and then we can work from there. BTW, we don’t use the WorkFront milestones, either. We have projects that might build out something, then have three or four go live events - maybe we roll it the solution to three groups at different times. WorkFront’s standard milestones don’t allow us to have the same milestone assigned to multiple tasks in a project plan, so we created a custom attribute with a drop down to tag tasks. Thanks, Eric

[LouiseRe2]

Hi Eric, That's part of the issue, there isn't a task that is marked or flagged in any way as the go live date. The date is set in a field within a project custom form. Or, it is the date that the first deliverable is scheduled to go live which would be the planned completion date of a parent task. So, what I was hoping was that we could do a calculation to work out how the schedule was progressing against either the date in the form or the earliest date any of the parent tasks within the project is planned to complete.

[EricLu2]

Hmmm, that is quite a challenge, I can see that now. Without knowing which task is the go live event, I don’t know how it would be possible to compare the project-level go-live date and anything found in the task list. I’m really inclined to recommend you create a custom task attribute, and then use that attribute to do the report. It gives you so many more options without requiring you deep dive into some Text Mode coding. This seems to be a more elegant solution, in my opinion. Sorry, I think a change in the way they represent the go live date is needed. We also have a custom task attribute called “Promise Date”. As sometimes happens, people make commitments (promises) when certain aspects of the project will be done. These promises may be fact-based or may not be. They may relate to the baseline or not. Okay, sometimes someone just commits to a date without checking with the PM. Anyway, we keep track of that promise date, so that we can compare the planned/projected dates with what was promised. If expectations need to be reset - if that promise needs to be adjusted - we can identify that straight away. This recognizes that sometimes work has multiple dates associated with it - last approved completion date (baseline), current forecast completion (planned), projected completion, and whatever date someone promised it would be done. Sorry I couldn’t be of more help. Eric

[TimGo1]

You can compare the task due date with the project custom data in a list view but you can't use it in charts. To use it in charts you'll need to add custom data at the task level that references the project's go live date custom data field. Tim Golden On May 18, 2016, at 8:33 AM, Louise Reynolds wrote: Hi Eric, That's part of the issue, there isn't a task that is marked or flagged in any way as the go live date. The date is set in a field within a project custom form. Or, it is the date that the first deliverable is scheduled to go live which would be the planned completion date of a parent task. So, what I was hoping was that we could do a calculation to work out how the schedule was progressing against either the date in the form or the earliest date any of the parent tasks within the project is planned to complete. -----End Original Message----- ________________________________ This e-mail from McGuireWoods may contain confidential or privileged information. If you are not the intended recipient, please advise by return e-mail and delete immediately without reading or forwarding to others.

[NRYNR]

If this is a project report, you can probably use the DATEDIFF function in a column of the report. For example, you could calculate the days between now and the Go Live Date. You can add a column to your report and text mode edit it, with your own edits to the valueexpression: valueformat=HTML description=Difference in days between today and target completion date textmode=true valuefield=Actual vs. Planned valueexpression=ROUND(DATEDIFF($$TODAY,{DE:Go LiveDate}),2) displayname=Today vs. Target There are also WORKDAYDIFF(uses the default schedule I believe) and WORKMINUTESDIFF functions if they make more sense.

[LouiseRe2]

Thank you Eric, you make a valid point and I will look further into how we can add some kind of flag.

[LouiseRe2]

Thank you Tim.

[LouiseRe2]

Hi Narayan, Thank you for your help, I will give this a try.

[EricLu2]

Please do let us know what you decide to do and how it worked out. Don’t leave us hanging. We need closure ☺

[BenettaPe]

I am wanting to calculate the age, one date from another date, between tasks. More specifically, the end date (actual completion date) of the shown task1 to the end date (actual completion date) of the next task. How do I configure this? I want to know how many days passed (time lapse) between the actual completion of the review call and the actual completion of the invitation to the account admin. In my bad example, they are the same date- but in reality of other projects they are not and should not be. So is there a way to "qualify" or "specify" which task actual completion date I want to use in the calculation? is this valid datediff(implementation review call.actual completion date, invite account admin.actual completion date) I saw this in the help - but I don't know what "valueexpression" mean... Actual Time Calculation in a Report The Text Mode code in this article can be used in order to get the actual time spent working on an object. The code subtracts Actual Start Date of an object from Actual Completion Date. The syntax is as follows: valueexpression=DATEDIFF({actualCompletionDate},{actualStartDate})