When creating a schedule, one thing stands out when presenting to an audience: the percent complete. While it is nice to see the start and finish date for the summary tasks in the schedule, it is essential to show how far along a task is. Most of the time, your project plan’s percent complete values will suffice, but there are other times where the percent complete might seem ahead or behind schedule. In this blog, we will discuss what OnePager has to offer to remedy this issue: a feature called %Complete EV.
Before we begin discussing this exciting feature in OnePager, I want to clarify that this is a OnePager proprietary calculation that only looks at the percent complete for summary tasks. If you find that your issues are with the non-summary tasks, you should check out our blog that covers that issue here.
Microsoft Project averages all the tasks under the summary task, giving you an overall percent complete. However, this calculation can be incorrect due to other factors that Microsoft Project didn’t consider, which is what OnePager %Complete EV fixes. If you look at the example below, you will see that the Summary Task is behind schedule, even though all of its children are right on track.
We want to change the OnePager Percent-complete field to %Complete EV to fix this. You can do this by going to Home > Chart Properties > Task Bars and clicking “%Complete Properties.” A window will open where you can select %Complete EV in the Percent-complete field dropdown.
This article used a Microsoft Project plan to demonstrate how to correct the %Complete for Summary Tasks. However, the same principle applies to both Smartsheet and Primavera P6 as well. Smartsheet treats the Summary Task percent complete the same way as Microsoft Project, while Primavera P6 doesn’t calculate percent complete at the WBS level at all, though it will do a calculation similar to Microsoft Project and Smartsheet if you manually insert a WBS Summary task into your schedule. So, whether you are using Microsoft Project, Smartsheet or Primavera P6, rest assured that %Complete EV will get your Summary Task percent complete exactly where it should be in your OnePager chart.