Unlocking Project Progress Insights: Mastering Percent Complete in OpenAir for Effective Project Management

Tracking how your team progresses in executing tasks is a critical part of project management. Monitoring a project’s progress is vital for various reasons, including identifying and fixing blockers, mitigating risks, and meeting deadlines. OpenAir recognizes the importance of knowing the status of a project and estimating its completion, especially for a professional services company. As such, it is integrated with a feature known as percent complete, one of the cornerstones of task management, to help you determine if you’re on target or falling behind. This article covers the essentials and how to harness the power of percent complete in OpenAir.

Percent Complete

What is it?

Percent complete, in the context of project management, is the relationship between what has been done and what is yet to be done, expressed in percentage. It tracks how far along you are in completing a project by showing how much work has been completed and how much more is yet to be done. The principal purpose of percent complete is to provide data needed to determine if the progress of a project is aligned with the project schedule. In OpenAir, it is a simple division of approved and planned/estimated hours. So, for example, if you had estimated it would take 50 hours to deliver a project, but you’re at 30 hours, then the percent complete of the project is 60%.

Why is it Important?

The knowledge of percent complete is essential for successful project delivery. It acts as a task management plan, helping you monitor your team’s progress and letting you know how much the team has done at any time. Doing so lets you determine if you’re on target or behind schedule.

Besides the ability to track progress, the percentage complete is also tied to resource management. Percent complete data showing your team is behind or ahead of schedule affects resource allocation. For instance, if the project lags, you might be tempted to reallocate resources to meet the deadline.

Percent Complete Setup and Management

The beauty of the percent complete in OpenAir is that it is auto-calculated. However, this will depend on how it is set up. OpenAir gives you four setup options, with the first being more straightforward. Set up OpenAir to divide approved hours by estimated/planned hours.

OpenAir recognizes that a typical project has other components besides hours, including task work completed, closed tasks, phases, milestones, and project roll-up. So, the second setup option for percent complete is based on task work completed. The option lets you manually set the percent complete on each task.

The closed tasks setup option lets you close tasks and mark them as 100% complete. The option has a couple of use cases, the most common being milestone management. In this instance, you have a task set up as a milestone for which you don’t have planned hours. When you close the task, OpenAir marks it as 100% complete.

Roll-up of percent complete is the fourth setup option. How percent complete rolls up are with the smallest increments at each task. In this case, each task has its percent complete, and then these tasks roll up to a phase which in turn rolls up to a project.

Forecasting

Understanding what percent complete is, its significance, and the mechanics of setting it up in OpenAir is crucial to understand its application in OpenAir. The most common application of percent complete is forecasting.

Revenue Forecasting

Revenue forecasting estimates the amount of revenues over a specific period. Percent complete in OpenAir lets you forecast your revenues using two key variables: charge projections and internal switches.

From the perspective of percent complete, the charge projections settings factor into more than just charges. They also serve as a foundation for revenue forecasting. Therefore, the charge projections settings you select will be your approach to projecting into the future. It’s recommended to use the last option – “worked and booked hours (ignore hours if worked or approved hours are logged)” – to avoid double counting the hours.

OpenAir also provides several internal switches to fine-tune your percent complete calculations and ensure the accuracy of your revenue projections. The specific switches to use will depend on the particular use case. Examples of internal switches to factor in include used amounts in percent complete revenue recognition and used amounts in incurred vs. forecast revenue recognition.

Percent Complete Rules

Think about forecasting as scheduling and booking resources into future periods. Based on what you factor into the projection equation, the system will calculate what percent complete will look like in those future periods. So, equations for forecasting percent complete can be complex, especially with the variables involved. With that being the case, certain revenue recognition rules that consider the percent complete within revenue forecasting should be considered. They include:

• Percent complete recognition rule: it is a more straightforward rule that gives you five simple options: percent complete for the project, percent complete for the task/phase, approved vs. planned hours for the project, approved vs. planned hours for task/phase, and approved vs. budget hours for the project.
• Incurred vs. forecast recognition rule: The percentage of the total incurred costs divided by total forecasted costs. In this case, incurred costs originate from actual costs: approved timesheets, approved expenses, and fulfilled purchase items. Forecasted costs originate from planned costs: estimated (assigned) hours, approved and booked hours, expenses, and purchases.

The main benefit of this rule is that it gives you the option to use the cost factor. It’s ideal when you need to split revenue earnings by user or when you need to consider expenses or purchase costs. However, it only gets complicated if you get into multi-currency accounts.

Customization

The good news with OpenAir’s percent complete is that it is highly customizable. You can customize the percent complete feature based on your organization’s unique needs in three critical ways. In the first customization option, you can custom calculate your percent complete by looking at actual hours versus budget hours instead of approved hours. This option can be useful if the process involving approved hours needs to be simplified. Simply set up a custom calculation and name it “custom percent complete,” which will be your reporting value.

The second option is scripting, which can go a long way in computing percent complete using worked hours. It is a great alternative to using the standard budget hours field over baseline hours for a particular project or task.

The other customization option is task form filters. In this instance, you’ll use custom calc plus a filter. So, when setting up a custom calculation, you can exclude certain task types.

Bottom Line

Delivering a successful project is the goal of every project manager. OpenAir’s percent complete feature is a valuable addition to your task management strategy, ensuring you consistently achieve this goal with every project. As demonstrated, percent complete lets you track the progress of your project and determine whether you’re on schedule. OpenAir takes the feature further by equipping you with controls and settings to customize your ability to monitor your projects that align to how your organization delivers projects. It allows you to determine the most reliable sources of calculations for actual and forecasting needs.

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