The Power of Percent Complete in OpenAir

Understanding when a project will be complete is critical for a professional services organization. Project completion impacts budgets, resourcing, sales, hiring, revenue realization, and reporting.

Regardless of what the definition of “done” is for an organization, having a view of that data is key. That’s where percent complete comes in.

Having a project’s percent complete value front and center makes a hundred decisions about your professional services business easier and more accurate. Thankfully, OpenAir makes it possible to get that number, from out-of-the-box calculations to the ability to customize how percent complete is computed to match your business model.

What is Percent Complete and Why it’s Important

From a project management perspective, percent complete is straightforward – it’s the relationship between what’s been done and the overall work that needs to be done on a project. The closer you are to 100%, the closer you are to being done.

Simple, right? But, of course, when it comes to the nuances of professional services, percent complete isn’t always so clear. For instance, you may have estimated 40 hours for a project, but at 32 hours, you’re already wrapping it up. Or, you might want to see the percent complete for a task, and what that looks like rolled up into the whole project.

The good news is that OpenAir handles the calculation of percent complete for you in a multitude of ways.

For instance, out of the box, OpenAir will compute percent complete on projects managed by tasks and planned hours. The percentage can be viewed right in your project plan for each task and is also rolled up into an overall project percent complete value.

This is a use case that’s useful for some companies. Another use case may be the need to use percent complete for revenue realization on fixed-fee projects. The project is incurring costs such as labor, and the business should be reflecting the revenue associated with those costs. The percent complete can help you take the correct amount of revenue based on the effort put into the project so far.

How OpenAir Helps With Percent Complete

With percent complete being such a valuable metric on projects, it’s not surprising that OpenAir would support this computation from the start. OpenAir understands there can be a lot of variables in the course of a project and even in how the data will be used. So, OpenAir offers other features to help manage those variables.

In addition to the basic percent complete computation, OpenAir has another feature called estimated hours or hours remaining. This alternative to percent complete can be used when the estimated hours you end with are different from those you planned, such as when you schedule 10 hours for a task, but the updated estimate is 12 hours. These updated estimates can then automatically calculate a new percent complete based on the change.

It’s also common to have a task completed without using all of the hours initially planned when the project was created. For this, OpenAir offers the ability to close a task. Even if the number of hours falls short of those planned, the task will show as 100% complete, and that percent will be reflected in the project plan and in the overarching percent complete number for the entire project.

It’s important to note that OpenAir uses planned hours to create the project’s percent complete value. This number isn’t based on the overall project. Instead, it’s rolled up, task by task. Therefore, things like non-billable tasks or milestones that have no planned hours will not be reflected in the project percent complete.

Other Ways Percent Complete Can Be Used in OpenAir

We’ve mentioned that OpenAir’s percent complete calculations can be used for revenue recognition on fixed-fee projects. We discuss in detail in our webinar, Managing Percent Complete in OpenAir, this isn’t the only way this metric can be used. Some options require more configuration than others, but OpenAir’s flexible platform makes customizing percent complete calculations possible.

Some other use cases where percent complete can be configured to your workflow:

• Mixed projects: Use percent complete on a partially fixed fee and partially time and material project to report on the fixed fee portion for revenue realization.
• Budget vs. Hours: You can use OpenAir to view percent complete against the project’s budget instead of just hours. This allows you to include things like expenses into the calculations.
• Forecasting and bookings: Percent complete can be a powerful tool for forecasting and for determining bookings.
• Custom Calculations: Custom calculations and scripting can be created if the out-of-the-box calculations and platform configurations can’t give you an accurate percent complete based on your workflows. Top Step has helped several PS organizations create custom percent complete calculations for their unique and specific needs.

Conclusion

There is a lot of data involved in understanding where a project is, what it costs, and its performance. Percent complete is powerful, and in OpenAir, a flexible metric that can provide information on everything from the health of a project to when and how to realize project revenue.

If you’d like more information on how percent complete in OpenAir can help you better manage your professional services and projects, check out our webinar, Managing Percent Complete in OpenAir. At Top Step, we’ve helped professional services organizations set up and customize OpenAir’s powerful platform to work well with their processes, and we can help you, too. Contact us today to learn more.