Managing Progress

The purpose of managing project progress is to establish mechanisms to monitor and compare actual achievements against those planned, provide a forecast for the project objectives and the project's continued viability and control any unacceptable deviations.

In itmSUITE® the progress of projects is managed with the estimations and the execution of project milestones.

Use of estimations for progress control

Estimations allow to enter budget, view balance and enter forecast for work and other costs. Automatically this makes available several key performance indicators, such as % Complete, Planned % Complete, Earn, Estimation At Completion vs. Budget, which make it possible to control the project progress at a general or project activity level. Estimations can be saved to record the progress at a specific time (estimation Estimation Date). Later they can be reloaded. See the estimation configuration page for more information on how to use estimations.

The status of a project is summarized by semaphores (see also semaphores page).

Use of project milestones for progress control

Project milestones can be used to plan and execute the progress checks (see the control plan configuration page for more information). An estimation (see the previous paragraph), representing the snapshot of the project, can be linked to the project milestone. This will freeze and make available the key performance indicators of the project at Estimation Date. Additional information and comments about the project, can be recorded in the project milestone fields.

Overall project status reports

In the project Reports section the "Summary report" and the "Tree-report " are made available in order to evaluate the overall status of a project. The "Tree-report" gives a synthetic and interactive view based on semaphores while the "Summary report" includes a static view of the semaphores but also include several additional project data.