Microsoft Project 2013: The Missing Manual

Obtaining Status Data

Once you’ve chosen your preferred progress-tracking approach and prepped your Project file for updating, the battle has only begun. In this section, you’ll learn ways to obtain the progress information you need without pulling team members’ teeth.

Collecting Task Status from Team Members

You can get most status information from your team members, although it’s not always as easy as it sounds. This section describes some of the best methods for extracting reliable and consistent information from resources.

Note

If your organization uses Project Server, then team members can submit their progress information through the Project Web App interface. That way, the data is automatically available for you to review and incorporate into your project plan.

Creating an Update Form

Whether you intend to ask people for updates in person, via email, or by using some other mechanism, you can simplify data collection by adding the tasks that are under way (or should be) to a form. An Excel spreadsheet is a great option: You can print it out and take it to your status meeting to fill in there or email it to team members. This section shows you how to quickly construct a task-update form.

The first thing you need is a list of the tasks you need to update. It’s easy to produce that list in Project and then copy it into an Excel spreadsheet. Here are the steps:

1. Display UpdateStatus view (if you downloaded it) or the status-update view you created (Setting Up a View to Make Updating Easy ...