Showing the extent of delays in days

[duduCOM]

Hi all,
I'm quite new into professional Project Management and MS Project.
I've been assigned to monitor the schedule of a project being handled by another company for my company.
The implementation of the project is behind schedule and I'm trying to reflect the extent of the delay in days in a MS Project file. I've tried inputing a new column - Actual Finish but this does not do what I want.
Is there anyway I can achieve this without calculating and entering the delay manually.
I feel it should be possible but the only idea that has come to mind so far is through VBA.
Please help if you have an idea.
Thanks

 

[PDQBach]

There are a couple of possibilities.

First of all, you should have been given a baselined plan. To confirm that it has been baselined, display the column "Baseline Start". Any tasks with a date of "NA" have not been baselined. You can baseline these tasks by selecting them and clicking on:

Tools > Tracking > Save baseline


To see the variance between the Baselined dates and the Actual dates:

View > Tracking Gantt
The blue bar shows the current schedule; the black bar shows the baselined dates.

To calculate the difference between the Baseline Finish and Actual Finish:

View > Gantt (or Tracking Gantt)
Insert the column "Duration 1"
RightMouseButton on the column header
click on "Customize Field"
In the popup click on the "Formula" button
In the formula popup paste this formula:

IIf([Actual Start]>55555,0,ProjDateDiff([Actual Start],[Baseline Start]))

Click on OK twice

 

[duduCOM]

Thanks PDQBach for the insight.
Unfortunately, the plan was not baselined as all the tasks displayed NA.
I guess that implies the formula will not work too - actually, I tried it and the cells displayed #error.

Is there any other thing I can do?

Thanks

 

[PDQBach]

Well, I suppose you could go back to an early version of the plan and try to enter original start dates into the current version of the plan. This is, of course, fraught with all sorts of potential areas for mixups. Without two dates it's impossible to determine if a task is late starting.

I just tried the formula again and found the problem. (Sorry.) Try this:

IIf([Actual Start]>55555,0,IIf([Baseline Start]>55555,0,ProjDateDiff([Actual Start],[Baseline Start])))

As a "go forward" possibility, you could baseline the project now. Any time, from now on, that task start dates change, you'll be able to see the impact on your schedule.

By the way, I just noticed that you referred to Finish dates. Just change "Start" to "Finish" in the above code.

As a final thought. You could take the current file, baseline it now, and whenever you discuss the project status you begin by saying, "we already knew the project was behind; since I've started tracking XYZ's progress, it has falled a further 999 days behind."

Good luck.