Simple techniques for project tracking

Project provides a wide array of methods you can use to track your project. You should choose a tracking method best suited for your project based upon the accuracy requirements of your project, time expendable on project updates, and complexities involved in both the project and updating techniques.

Percentage completion is an important concept to know about for the discussion that follows. It indicates how much of the task has been finished so far. We will use different techniques to tell Project the percentage completion of individual tasks. In other advanced situations, Project can algorithmically deduce percentage completion based on the other clues that we provide.

Let's suppose that you are handling a 10-person, 10-month, ten-million-dollar project with 200 tasks in your schedule. With a weekly status update cycle, you can normally expect between 20 to 40 updates to the schedule every week. Unless the update cycle is well planned...