Project Progress Reporting

Learn how to check where a project or a projects tasks stand with respect to completion.
When your client calls you and asks how soon the entire project or some portion of it will be complete, will you be able to give a supportable answer? You can use Sitespring to determine the progress of tasks and whole projects so that you wont need to guess which projects are on schedule and which projects need additional efforts to complete on time.

Project progress elds

In the current version of Sitespring, three elds are relevant to project progress:

Status: Customizable eld with general status values, such as Open and Complete Estimated Time: Either the managers estimate or the developers estimate Actual Time: Developers update this eld each day they work on the task

Both projects and tasks have a status eld with default values to indicate whether or not the item is started, nished, or on hold. These elds can give you a general sense of project progress. You can use this eld to create custom progress tracking choices that more explicitly indicate the progress of a project or task. By dividing actual time by estimated time, you can generate an estimated percent complete (actual / estimate = estimated % complete). Since these elds are not mandatory, you will need to set the policy that team members update this information. This article covers:

Extending Sitesprings project progress tracking capabilities Methods of viewing and analyzing project progress

Extending Sitesprings Project Progress Tracking Capabilities

The standard status and time elds already provide a good breakdown of project and task progress. However, if you want to customize Sitespring to enable you and your team to track project progress more thoroughly, this section shows how to extend Sitesprings capabilities. You do not need to implement these optional steps to use the section on viewing and analyzing project progress. You can use one of two methods to add more detail to your project progress tracking:

Customize the project and task status values Create one or more custom metadata elds for project progress tracking

Macromedia Sitespring: Project Progress Reporting

Customize the project and task status values

The simplest way to add new project progress reporting options is to customize status values. Projects and tasks use the same list of values, and you can customize the list of values included in the Status eld. The primary advantage of customizing status values is that they are visible on the My Projects and My Tasks modules of the home page. Thus you can sort by the status eld, search by the status eld, and generate reports that include status value information on the overview page. Figure 1 shows the Status Values module with the full set of default values along with some custom values designed to indicate the progress of a task or project. The best method of adding an indication of project progress is to include a percentage along with the default status value. None of the default values are discardedyou dont have to give up one type of information to get another type of information. You can add percentages to the end of any of the custom values or create values of your own and add percentages to these.
Add button

Custom values designed to work with system-supplied default values

Figure 1: Using custom status values to augment the Status eld

Adding custom status values does not keep team members from using the system-supplied values, which cannot be deleted. If you want team members to use the new values you create, you will need to make it a matter of policy. You may not want to add too many percentages. You can indicate a general progress level as needed, but adding too many choices will make the status values list very long. Another drawback is that you cannot perform calculations on these percentages the way you can with custom metadata elds (metadata elds are discussed later in this article). You can also customize status values by placing the percentage rst, followed by the original status value, such as 50% Done-Open. The difference is only apparent when you sort tasks or projects (alphabetically) by this eld. If you want all open tasks to be kept together, write the status values as they are shown in Figure 1. If you want tasks to be listed primarily by percent complete, place the percentage number rst.

Macromedia Sitespring: Project Progress Reporting

Create one or more custom metadata elds for project progress tracking
If you want to create a method of tracking project progress that enables you to use the math functions of Microsoft Excel, you can create custom metadata elds for each type of progress reporting you want to record. You can add these custom metadata elds to either the Project Detail page or the Task Detail page. For example, you could add a eld titled, Estimated Percent Complete, and users could type in any percentage, such as the result of actual hours divided by estimated hours. To add elds, you need system administrator access, because this task requires you to stop the Sitespring server and Sitespring Versioning. After stopping these applications, you will add metadata elds to an XML le using a text editor, such as Microsoft WordPad. The le you need to modify is located in your Sitespring root folder:
{install drive}:\Sitespring\webapps\intranet-app\WEB-INF\properties.xml

Copy and paste properties.xml in the same folder and rename the copy properties_old.xml to preserve the original as a backup. Open properties.xml using WordPad. Figure 2 shows properties.xml with two custom metadata elds added to the Task detail page. Figure 2 shows where to place metadata eld lines for projects and tasks.

Add Project Detail metadata here

Add Task Detail metadata here

Figure 2: Properties.xml with two custom metadata elds

Figure 3 shows how to format your lines of code for adding time-tracking elds to a project or task. In general, all property name tags must be unique, all lowercase with no spaces or special characters. The label tag is the information users will see within Sitespring, so type any short title you want within the quotes for this tag.
Enter this code in properties.xml:

<property name=estpctcomp label=Estimated Percent Complete type=real maximum=100 />

For this output on the page:

Figure 3: Custom project progress metadata eld and the results in Sitespring

Macromedia Sitespring: Project Progress Reporting

In Figure 3 on page 3, the property has the code type real, a number eld that allows decimals, as in 5.5. The eld has a maximum set to 100 to prevent unrealistic percentages. Save properties.xml as text only; then restart the Sitespring server and versioning service. Open Sitespring to verify the custom elds were added correctly. If Sitespring fails to load correctly, check the properties.xml le for syntax errors.

Methods of Viewing and Analyzing Project Progress

Whether you use the standard project progress elds or add custom elements, you can use the following methods to track project progress:

Viewing project progress information directly in Sitespring: Viewing project and task details individually Viewing and sorting an overview of all tasks Creating task reports and viewing the results Exporting task information to Excel or project information to Microsoft Project and formatting the results

Viewing project progress information directly in Sitespring

You can view project progress information three different ways: view project and task details individually, view and sort an all-task overview, or create task reports and view the results. All of these methods may be performed whether or not you have added custom information to Sitespring.

Viewing project and task details individually

When you only need to check the progress of one project or a few tasks, the easiest method is to view either the Project detail page or the Task detail page. Open the Project detail page and click the Show All hyperlink for tasks to view the full task list for the project. The full task list will give a general indication of project progress. Click an individual task hyperlink in the Tasks module to open the Task detail page. The Task detail page shows a team members progress toward the estimated completion, plus any custom time recording information your organization uses. This method is not suited for a big picture view, however. The next internal Sitespring method is better suited to an overview of employee time.

Viewing and sorting an overview of all tasks

Another way to get a sense of how a project is progressing is to open the Project Detail page and scroll down to the task area. If there are more tasks than can be listed on one page, click the Show All hyperlink at the bottom of the Tasks module. Click the Status header to sort by status. This step is especially useful if you have created custom project tracking status values. Figure 4 on page 5 shows all tasks for a project sorted by status.
Macromedia Sitespring: Project Progress Reporting 4

Click the Status header to sort by status

Figure 4: Show all tasks for a project, sorted by Status

Creating task reports and viewing the results

To get an idea of task progress for one or more projects, use Sitesprings task reporting function. You can generate lists of tasks that include tasks from multiple projects, lists of tasks that have only certain status values (even custom values), or lists of tasks related only to an individual team member. Create and save as many different types of reports as you need. This section describes one example report: generating a task report for several projects, then sorting the data by status. You may want to run such a report to view all tasks for the projects you are in charge of, or for several interrelated projects. To create a task report that includes several projects, open a new task report and select the rst project; then hold the Shift key while selecting the remaining projects. Leave all other aspects of the report as All Selections. Save the report. Figure 5 on page 6 shows the output of a task report for several interrelated projects. Whenever you need to know the general progress of these projects, you can run the report and see all the tasks, including the status of each task. You cannot see the hours, however, without drilling down into each task or by using the export data method.

Macromedia Sitespring: Project Progress Reporting

This report was sorted by Status

Figure 5: Multiple project report sorted by Status column

Exporting information to Excel and formatting the results

A quick way to analyze project progress information is to export your custom task report to Microsoft Excel. If you prefer, you can also export project information to Microsoft Project, but any custom metadata elds you have made will be placed in the notes section, so you will not be able to easily use the data from such elds. Also, you can only export reports as a comma-separated value (CSV) le, the le type used with Excel. To export to Excel, create a task report; then select all of the tasks and click Export. Export the le to your desktop or another location; then open the le in Excel. You can sum up project progress simply by viewing the report output. Figure 6 gives an example of an exported employee report that was automatically formatted by Excel.

Figure 6: Exported task report in Excel

Macromedia Sitespring: Project Progress Reporting

You can view both the estimated hours and the actual hours for each task, as well as any custom information mentioned previously in this article. If you made custom metadata elds, you can perform additional calculations on these elds and the default elds using Excels math functions. For actual and estimated hours, as well as any custom numeric time elds, you can use Excel to perform math functions, such as generating a total for a column or creating a comparison percentage between two columns of information.

Generating totals for Excel columns

You can get a good indication of the progress of a project by summing up all of the estimated and actual hours for every task yet to be completed. If these elds are properly maintained, the difference between estimated and actual hours will give you a good idea of the number of hours needed to complete the project (estimated actual hours = estimated remaining hours). Multiplying all hours billed at the same rate by the billing rate will indicate the revenue yet to be captured.

Creating a comparison percentage between two columns

You can create a comparison percentage between any two columns of numbers in Excel. One comparison you could make with this formula is to compare actual time against estimated time to determine an estimated percentage complete. This percentage simply divides actual time by estimated time (actual / estimate = percent complete). Figure 7 contains this calculated percentage in column O. After the rst percent is entered, drag from the rst data cell to the last data cell of the row, starting with the row where the rst calculation was made. Follow the menu path: Edit > Fill > Down, to format the remaining cells. Then format the cells as percentages. You can generate an overall percent complete from the totals of estimated time and actual time (in Figure 7, cell O12). This overall percentage is calculated from the sum of hours. Do not generate an average of the percentages listed in the Estimated Percent Complete column, because the percentages would not take into account the amount of work needed (a 50% complete 2-hour task would have the same effect on the overall percent complete as a 50% complete 200-hour task).

Totals row

Calculated percentage complete

Figure 7: Spreadsheet with Totals row and calculated percentages

When you have determined the full set of calculations you want to perform, consult your Excel documentation to see how to further automate applying these calculations using Excels macros.

Macromedia Sitespring: Project Progress Reporting