Progress Calculations Dialog Box
Progress calculations are run for several reasons.
Some of these are:
- To automatically calculate activity status information
- To update resource progress based on activity status
- To update the physical percent complete for Earned Value calculations
To automatically enter activity status information, enter a new value for Time Now. Open Plan uses this date when it automatically updates activity status.
If you leave the default Time Now date unchanged (The default date that Open Plan shows in the Time Now field is the date you used for Time Now the last time you ran time analysis), Open Plan does not update activity status unless other options in this dialog box are changed as well. This feature is useful if you want to update only the physical percent complete or resource progress values.
By leaving Time Now unchanged, you can run progress calculations more than once during the same reporting cycle. For example, you might want to rerun progress calculations if you had not selected an option when you first performed the calculation and now want to run progress calculations with that option selected.
For example, assume that the last time you ran time analysis you used a Time Now date of January 1. (This becomes the default Time Now date in the Progress Calculations dialog box.) If you change the Time Now date in this dialog box to February 1, Open Plan assumes that all activities with dates before February 1 actually started or completed on those dates. It, therefore, updates the values in the actual date fields to be the same as the selected date fields.
Because progress calculations use dates that are calculated during time analysis, that function must be run at least once before you can perform progress calculations.
Typically, project managers might use the progress calculations feature to calculate status for large projects and then enter information for any exceptions manually.
You can also perform progress calculations in Batch Mode. This allows you to run progress calculations for multiple projects at one time. To run progress calculations in Batch Mode, select more than one project from the Details pane of the Open Plan Explorer, and click the Progress Calculations button. The Progress Calculations [Batch Mode] dialog box will be displayed. Set your options, and click OK.
If a project is closed, Open Plan will open it in Exclusive mode, perform the process, save the changes, and then close the project. If a project cannot be opened in Exclusive mode (because another user has it open in Exclusive or Shared mode), it will be skipped.
If you have a project open when the batch process is run, progress calculations will be performed on the project, but the changes will not be saved and the project will remain open. You must manually save the changes yourself.
Open Plan creates one progress calculations session log, listing the project results in the order in which the projects were processed in the batch.