Microsoft Project 2013: The Missing Manual

Methods for Tracking Status

The approach you choose to track the progress of your project depends on your organization, the type of project, and the level of detail your stakeholders need. From a practical standpoint, it also depends on how much time you have to gather and incorporate progress data into the project plan. (Collecting detailed status data won’t do any good if you don’t have time to enter it into Project.) This section starts by describing the difference between updating tasks and updating assignments, and when it makes sense to use each one. Then you’ll learn about the specific data you can collect.

Updating Assignments vs. Updating Tasks

The first decision you need to make about status is whether to update tasks or assignments. Updating assignments gives you a more accurate picture of status than updating tasks does, but it also demands more time from you and your team members. If your team members are too busy to submit status updates or you can’t keep up with entering the data in your Project file, then your schedule won’t reflect what’s really happening in your project—and you won’t have the information you need to make corrections. For that reason, updating tasks makes more sense for most projects.

Note

In Project, you can update both assignments and tasks within the same project—but you can’t update them both for the same task. If you update assignments on a task, the program rolls the assignment values up to the task level. If you update a task, you can tell Project ...