Running a project

Now that you have created a project (well not really, but lets pretend), the next thing is to monitor a project as it progresses.

Recording Progress

Ideally, as the project progresses, the project team should be completing work at about rate shown in the original project plan.   The best way to track this is to mark tasks as complete as soon as they are actually finished off.

If you want to tell the system that a task is finished:
  1. Select the task in the list and open the Item View (either click towards the right-hand side of the list, or press the Forward button)
  2. Press the Complete button.
  3. The task is now marked as complete. JXCirrus Project will no longer make up any plans for it.

The symbol for the task should now change to Complete, which means that the task is complete.

Try this for the "Project Plan" task.  Now click on the main project and look at the details in the item view.   Under duration, it should now say "Duration: 18:00:00 (8:00:00 remaining)".   The percentage completion should also have changed to 55%.

When you close off a task, the system will also recalculate the plan.   Because there is now only 8 hours of work on this project, the completion time will be much earlier.   Recalculating the plans and comparing the updated completion date with your milestones is a very good way of tracking how the project is going.   If the project is expected to complete after the due date, then you have an issue and may need to bring in more resources (or re-allocate tasks if the problem lies with one resource).   The system will highlight tasks that look like running over their due date (see Alerts).

Recording time on the task

JXCirrus Project can also record the actual time spent on tasks.

The time spent can be combined with Baselines to track budgeted time versus actual.

Give it a try...

It is probably worth giving the system a full-on try now. You can always refer to this manual by pressing the Help button wherever you are.

A couple of useful links to help you in the manual:

The Complete Manual