Hi David,

We are currently using Units % complete & are arranging for our people to update their progress on a weekly basis by re-estimating the remaining labour units & remaining duration for each activity, thus we are forcing a “new” remaining units / time.

This seems to work quite well for us, as most supervisors that I have met are definitely better at understanding how many people they need to finish an activity that they are working on, than estimating the % complete of a task. This may be due to the fact that as humans they like to ‘pump-up’ how they are travelling to date but they then also don’t want to sell themselves short with their future manpower requirements (Pessimism vs. Optimism).

As an example.

If I have people working 10 hrs a day and I ask a supervisor to accurately estimate the % complete of an activity that his men are working on, he may look at the task and make a gut feel guess of “Ah it’s about 50% complete mate…”

When I then look at the bookings he has had 2 people working on the task for the last two days and therefore they have burnt 40hrs in total so far.

Based on this 50% complete statement, you could assume that the EAC is going to be 80hrs in total, but if you where then to ask the supervisor to estimate the number of men he will need to complete the task and he says “I need 3 fitters for the next 3 days” he is therefore saying that he requires a further 60hrs to complete the activity & they are actually only 40% of the way through the task.

The downside is that you need to carefully manage your bookings & ensure that all activities that are booked to during the week are updated, and if something un-expected pops up, you need to have a process to mange the potential for the % to go backwards scenario. I’ve also noticed that once you start to book to each activity the durations do tend to stretch out when you book hours to it & the logic can become very ambiguous if the bookings trigger your actual starts, however if you use retained logic, it can be managed.

Further to this, I have also been involved in another company where the supervisors where required to estimate their % complete & they were all superstars at completing the job to 90%, but the last 10% always burnt 20-30% of the budget & caught them out. To resolve this issue we moved to steps & electronic updates via the web app, thus creating a type of work pack for each activity, this works quite well but updating is pretty full on due to the large number of steps that you then have to put into the schedule.

Hope this helps

Kind Regards

Mark Porter

Naveen,

IMHO

In order to calculate how many manhours are left to do, I need to know how much work is achieved and how many manhours were booked to achieve the performed work. This gives me the CPI to apply to the remaining manhours.

Units% complete is current hours booked divided by at completion hours, except it does not go above 100.

If I have an activity whose budgeted labour hours is 10 and percent complete type is "units", when I book 10 actual manhours to it, it shows as 100% complete. I may not have achieved any work at all at this stage, all I know is that I have booked 10 timesheet hours.

This how SAP (a production planning system)works, not a project planning system.

I would REALLY like a field called "Units % complete to be Earned value divided by Budget Quantity..... but we don’t have one in P6.

I suspect that the duration type of the activity may be the issue.

If you use "duration" per cent complete type, then the % complete reduces the remaining duration, NOT the remaining manhours. If your duration type has a fixed units per time period, e.g "Fixed Duration and units/time" then the remaining manhours are reduced BECAUSE the units per time period are fixed. BUT if you use, say, "fixed duration and units" then the remaining manhours are not recalculated when you add a duration per cent complete, it is the remaining units per time that are recalculated.....