This article will familiarize you with the overview and deployment of Effort Tracker Analytics.

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Overview

The Effort Tracker component provides a consolidated view of all project-related effort data to help in analyzing the project progress against the plan established/approved, It indicates the amount of effort still required to complete all pending/in-progress activities.

1. Baseline Effort: Baseline Effort refers to original work estimates arrived at and approved after defining the project WBS (Work breakdown structure) before the project begins and is considered only from ‘Task’ assignments. It is the primary reference point against which the project’s actual effort spent is measured. This can be defined in the application’s MS Project interface as well as using the ‘Baseline (current)’ option for projects using any scheduling type. One can store multiple ‘Baselines’.
2. Planned Effort: Planned Effort refers to the current work plan, based on the current rate of progress and the remaining effort required to go. This indicates the total projected project effort required to complete the project based on the current state of progress. In the product, planned effort refers to the ‘Work’ column as in the application’s MS Project interface or the effort planned in the ‘Planned Effort’ column of the workflow stage on which a user is assigned.
3. Actual Effort: Actual effort refers to the effort entered by project resources against their respective task/workflow assignments in the product timesheet module and submitted for approval. The actual effort is used in determining the actual progress of the project compared to the baseline/planned progress.
4. Remaining Effort: Remaining effort refers to the effort still required by project resources to complete the respective task/workflow assignments. Users can indicate/enter the remaining effort for the ‘Task’ assignments in the ‘Remaining Hours’ column of the timesheet whereas for workflow assignments this is computed based on the below formulas.
5. For Task Assignments: Remaining Effort = Sum of remaining effort entered by resources in the timesheet against their respective task assignments.
6. For Workflow Assignments: Remaining Effort = Planned Effort – Actual Effort

• • If ‘Estimated Effort’ or ‘Planned Effort’ is changed for a workflow item and there’s actual effort logged, then Remaining Effort = ‘Estimated Effort – Actual’ effort.
  • If actuals are entered, the remaining effort would be calculated as ‘Estimated Effort- Actual Effort’, as a user can’t enter remaining hours against eForms.
  • If the actual is more ‘Estimated’, then the value of ’’Remaining Hours’ can get shown as ‘zero’.

Deployment

This metric is available at the Project level. You can group the data by Project or Task Plan.

Notes:

1. Actual effort is considered only from approved time sheets.
2. Baseline work only considers the ‘Current’ baseline of MSP  and scheduling task plans and data from Form items is not included in the computation.
3. This metric is computed for all tasks/workflow (Open and closed) items and gets refreshed using the Refresh button.
4. The ‘Planned Effort’ for tasks is most accurate after a  check-out/check-in has been performed for the project, as these are recomputed in MS project based on the actual and remaining effort entered by all the resources assigned to a task.
5. The metric gets updated the next day and not immediately.
6. The metric shows only baselined task data.