Overview
An activity that has one or more sub-activities is called a parent activity.
If it has not been entered manually, a parent activity’s completion rate is calculated automatically, using those of its top level sub-activities.
Example:
Activity named ‘Design’ has 2 sub-activities: ‘Text’ and ‘Drawings’. The Text sub-activity in turn has 3 sub-activities, as in the picture:
In calculating completion rate of Design activity only Drawings and Text sub-activities will be used.
When calculating parent activity completion rate, the following formula is used:
where Pi is the completion rate (progress) of the i-th top level sub-activity, and Hi is its estimated hours. But, if estimated hours are not specified (or are equal to zero), then EP will check to see if the duration can be used, if not, then actual hours (i.e. if neither estimated hours nor duration are available (or are equal to zero)). For the case when none is specified, see below.
Special cases in calculating project progress
- If a sub-activity has neither estimated hours, nor duration, nor actual hours specified, the largest Hi is used.
- If all the sub-activities have neither estimated hours, nor duration, nor actual hours specified, the above formula has a simpler form:
where Pi is the completion rate (progress) of the i-th top level sub-activity, and i is the number of the sub-activities used in the calculation.
In Design activity Drawings one has 54 estimated hours and 20% as completion rate, Text – 26 and 35%, respectively.
According to the first formula, the parent activity completion rate will be:
(54 x 20 + 26 x 35)/(54 + 26) = 24.87.
Since completion rates are given in integers, the activity will have 25% as its completion rate.