In a perfect project delivery situation, where every team member completes every task on schedule, there should never be unfinished work in the past. Or to put it a different way, there should never be a case where the work is scheduled to be completed before the project status date. In reality, very few weeks go by without at least one task not getting completed on schedule and therefore being late. Having a late task in the plan, while obviously not ideal, doesn’t necessarily mean that the project is red. It simply means that the work scheduled didn’t happen as planned.
And while late tasks are a project reality, we still have to make project adjustments to move this work forward and get it rescheduled. Why? Because the “resource” can no longer complete those tasks on the originally planned date. Failing to make this adjustment results in a potential resource overload — the resource could now be scheduled not only to complete the unfinished work from the past but also a full load of new work.
The first step is to move the scheduled dates for all incomplete work forward, past the status date (which represents the last day of the previous reporting period). This is the earliest possible date on which the work can get completed.
We do this from the Project ribbon > Status Section > Update Project button. This launches the Update Project dialog, shown below. On this dialog, select the second option — Reschedule uncompleted work to start after — and ensure that the date field is set to the current status date. Then ensure that the Entire project radio button is selected and press OK.
Caution: Do not select the first option from the Update Project dialog — Update work as complete through. This option assumes that all work has been completed based on the original plan as of the status date and updates the completion percentage accordingly. A proactive project manager won’t want the project status updated automatically without detailed status and timesheets from the team members.
Project will then move all tasks with uncompleted work forward to start (or continue if some actual work had been recorded) after the current status date. Change highlighting will provide full details of the changes made to the overall project. This will move the uncompleted tasks forward along with predecessor tasks and could even create resource over-allocations as this work is rescheduled. Because doing so can have a significant impact on the project, it’s important to review all the changes.
Next, it’s important to review the plan to fully understand the impact that moving this work forward has on the overall schedule and resource workloads. It may be necessary to make additional schedule changes. Bringing the rescheduled work forward could have over allocated some resources and changed critical project deadlines. At this point, you should use other Microsoft Project functionality such as Critical Path Analysis, Resource Leveling and Task Path to further adjust the schedule as needed.
Rescheduling uncompleted work lingering from the past is a simple but powerful function in Project. Using this feature ensures that your project schedule always reflects the full amount of work required to complete the project. We recommend that you include this step in your weekly status update cycle to reduce the amount of manual scheduling effort otherwise required to bring this work forward.
Photo courtesy Orange County Archives through a Creative Commons CC By 2.0 license.
Kenneth Steiness
Jorge, it actually uses the “Status Date” to set a ‘Start No Earlier Than’ constraint on tasks that have not yet started and are currently scheduled to start before the status date. For in-progress tasks, it splits the tasks so that actual work stays in the past and remaining work is moved forward. As for float, that’s really not much of a consideration since we’re talking about moving work that wasn’t completed in the past forward of the status date. Yes, there will most likely be an impact to the critical path and free float, but that’s to be expected when work doesn’t get completed on schedule.
Kenneth Steiness
Thanks Mark D. Yes, I should’ve emphasized that under Schedule Options, you need to select “Split in-progress tasks” for this to work (it’s selected by default though). As for Task Types, it’s definitely always a consideration, but the ‘Update Project’ feature works for all Task Types.
Kenneth Steiness
Hi John S. Rescheduling uncompleted work from the past (with ‘Update Project’) is a powerful technique, but just one of the key steps in the weekly process for schedule updates. Since we can’t go back in time (yet) to do work that was scheduled last week, we need to move this forward, regardless. As such, the ‘Update Project’ feature does a very nice job of this.
The ‘Start No Earlier Than’ constraints that are applied don’t have a negative impact on the forecasting ability of the schedule (above and beyond the negative impact of already running late) since they are aligned to the status date. In fact, in our Schedule Analyzer App, we only call out constraints that are not in the past or on the status date. If a schedule is built to industry standards, such as those from PMI (Practice Standards for WBS and Scheduling), then only constraints in the future can have a negative impact on our forecast.
We have thousands of Project Managers in hundreds of organizations using this technique with a great deal of success.
Matthew Bryan
Hi Folks, I am on the fence of using this method. A quick push of a button bringing tasks into the future negates the opportunity to learn as to why they are in the past. I do not use this function for that reason. Instead I have the team update Actual Start and remaining duration why statusing to put the started yet not completed tasks into the future. Then insert a “Delay” Task that includes the reason for the delay in the task description and detail out the cause for the delay in the notes. So when I perform lessons learned/retrospectives we have the history as to why the delay took place so I can eliminate it’s cause for the next project, phase or deliverable.
Kenneth Steiness
Hi Matthew, you can absolutely update Actual Start and Remaining Duration, but that doesn’t catch work that was supposed to start in the past and didn’t. Also, most of our clients now want to do resource capacity/demand management and as such we really need effort-based schedules with resource allocations and then update ‘Actual Work’ and ‘Remaining Work’. As far as learning why tasks are in the past, we often see that getting communicated in Project Web App (PWA), where team members can add comments to individual assignments and the PM can review the impact of accepting task updates before they’re consumed into the schedule. I’m not a big fan of adding ‘Delay’ tasks since that has other implications to the scheduling. It becomes more difficult to do the ‘quantifiable measure’ of the schedule as the ‘delay’ tasks will add a lot of exceptions.
Brian Allen
Is there a way to view the tasks that have work in the past? I was hoping the late filter would perform this function but it does not. It includes tasks that have work rescheduled past the status date. Lat is calculated based off percent complete not if there is work in the past.