what's the best way to enter actuals into a big project plan

Question

Hello,

i thought of using the expertise found on this forum to find the best way to enter Actuals into the project plan.

I found this gets a bit challenging as your project plan expands and gets bigger and bigger (~1000 lines).

what i use is a different system to capture all the actual hours done by resources on a specific project and i give them different codes for different tasks.

once i capture the hours with their codes, i try to manually match them with the grouping i did in my plan.

i can have the actual hour exported to excel from this program.

I was wondering if that's what everyone would use. (Aside from Project server), what do you recommend?

Answer 1

I personally create a workbook for each person for each week and update the schedule from that book (once updated). I use VBA to do this. Unfortunately, there are many ways to update and choices are driven by how detailed an update your resources/stream leads are prepared to go. For example the minimum useful update is to enter Actual start, actual duration and remaining duration for each task.

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Rod Gill

The one and only Project VBA Book

Rod Gill Project Management

Answer 2

As Rod mentioned, there could be numerous ways to update it and all depends on the business need. I do update of Actual Start, Actual work and remaining work.

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Sapna Shukla

Answer 3

Thank you Rod and Sapna for your reply. The work column is a key factor in my organization. I would like to use a more efficient way to update tasks by their Actuals. Maybe using VBA, do you mind elaborating more on this Rod?

Thank you for your help

Answer 4

I have VBA macros that create the workbooks and another that updates schedules based on the completed update files. I've found that each organisation tends to use different processes and have different needs, so one macro doesn't fit them all, but I have a great starting point.

Inevitably each team has different levels of acceptance for updating weekly. Some need extreme hand holding, others are just happy all task names are pre-filled and its an easy timesheet!

But I'm certainly available to help. Email me. My email address is on the web site in the Project Management link in the signature below.

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Rod Gill

The one and only Project VBA Book

Rod Gill Project Management