How to Track Project Progress with Nodes & Links

00:01 Nodes and Links makes it really easy for you to track the progress of your project. So once you’ve uploaded a version of your project into the platform, it will automatically open up on the homepage for the latest version of your project where you can select any of the other versions if you want. And firstly, the first widget you see is the one is my project progress weighted by duration or activity count. Here you can see what your assigned baseline in here so V three in this case but you can change it to any other version if you want by

00:38 clicking on the three dots is doing in terms of planned and with the planned early and late envelopes and then you have the actuals up to the day to date in a thick blue line and if you hover over you can see the variance there and then finally it has the forecast and the forecast early and late there as well scaled by month week or day and you can download this as a graphic to use on reports as well. To the right of that we have which activities do I care about and this list is a list of bookmarked activities that you can bookmark within schedules activities

01:18 screen here and then every time you upload a new version of the schedule again automatically the platform will look at the latest planned starts and finishes for those activities so you have them there to hand soon as you are in the project and again you can download those as a table to use in the report as well. As we scroll down the page we find a few other widgets which might be useful for you if you are tracking the progress of your project. Here we have which WBSS are falling behind weighted by duration or activity

01:58 count again and you can see how the level one WBSS are tracking versus your assigned baseline the color gradient going from green to red shows how much it is slipping versus the baseline and the size of the segment is corresponding to the size of the WBS in proportion to the entire project so that’s the home page and a few of the widgets that can help you again with these widgets you can download them to use them in reports which makes it really really quick and easy and they’re all automatically loaded.

00:01 One way of understanding your network of activities within your project is if you use our visualize screen and go to connections. Here you can see three different columns. The first column gives you the activity photos so you can filter your activities by started active task duration and duration start. In the middle, you have different layouts. One is the polar layout. You have your start of the project in the middle and then your plan completion towards the edge of your circle. But if you want to go and have a different layout, you can also use the first

00:41 layout where towards the center is your plan completion. But you also can easily see your isolated networks within this layout. So if you go back to the depolar layout and want to understand what leads to my plan completion, you can see here you have activity details. You have two successors and four deprived predecessors. But you can easily choose another activity and you see here on the bottom right the neighbour node neighbourhoods and so you can make it bigger and simpler see what leads to your activities and what are the neighbours of

01:30 your activity. So this is an easy way to understand how many activities do you have in your project, how many relationships are in between it, what are the neighbourhoods for it, how many successors or predecessors do I have for my activities, but as I said you can also just choose OK with a filter, I only want to have it in a certain range of start date this is an easily visualization of each neighbourhood and understanding the network of your activities.

00:02 For a more top line view that you might be reporting on a monthly update to more stakeholders you can go to progress and then trend analysis and here you can track up to ten milestones or activities within your project and look at how they are tracking in terms of finish date in each update that you’ve uploaded to nodes and links now once you’ve selected these and you upload a new version the program will automatically plot the new finish date as well so there’s nothing for you to do apart from coming

00:39 to this screen and then download your graphs and your table and put them on a report which makes it really super easy for you to communicate both visually and in tabular form how each one of your key milestones or activities within the project is tracking in the new update and tracking in general and you know whether things are being pushed out for example here all i have to do is to select any activity i’m going to select plan completion click on it and then that is plotted along to show how the plan completion

01:19 date has moved across the different updates of the schedule and we can see there is a slow but sure delay in the plan completion and that is something that stakeholders may want to know you can download it here and it’s really simple and really effective at communicating how things are being pushed out it can also be an indication of how the project is performing and also in terms of if these key milestones and activities that you’re tracking are being pushed out the halo effect that it might have on the rest of your project.