Physical Progress

There are three different methods of calculating the actual progress of activities: Duration Percent
Complete, Units Percent Complete, and Physical Percent Complete. The first two are explained in the
previous articles and this article will cover the last one, Physical % Complete.

We will also discuss the ways of choosing the appropriate percent complete field in later articles, and
will now focus on the nature and calculations only.

The Concept of Physical Progress

The progress of some activities is not measured appropriately by the means of duration or units. In such
cases, we use the concept of physical progress.

The physical progress of an activity is a manually-entered value determined by the user. The value can
be based on either of these two:

On physical parameters that are not applicable inside the plan – the amount of concrete poured, the
length of the pipes laid down, and the number of light bulbs installed, are examples of this kind. You can
always use resources to implement these parameters, but they are not usually the only assignment (you
also have human resource assignments, equipment assignments, etc.) and in such cases, the Units %
Complete will be calculated based on a combination of the main parameter and all other assignments of
the activity, which is not your desired result. So, you can measure this kind of progress by resource units
and Units % Complete, only when that resource is the only one assigned to the activity. Otherwise,
implementing these parameters will not be easy in an automated system and entering them manually is
usually preferred.

On expert judgement based on the physical progress of the final product or result – sometimes the
physical parameters (as described before) are not suitable basis for progress measurement and expert
judgement is preferred.

Either way, physical progress is determined outside the schedule.

Two Types of Physical Progress in Primavera P6

There are two methods of dealing with physical values in Primavera P6:

Entering them manually; this is the default method and is done by entering whatever you wish in the
Physical % Complete field of the activity.

Using Activity Steps; this is done by selecting predefined manual values.

These two types are explained below.

Using Activity Steps
One of the measurement methods, also described in the Earned Value Management for determining the
earned value, is using activity steps. Imagine an activity: designing the foundation of the equipment xyz.

It’s common for the progress of activities related to “design” to follow steps instead of incremental
values; for example:

0% for not-started activities and those that are not completed and issued yet

80% for the completion and the first issue of the design

100% for the approved design

So we will have the following progress curve for the sample activity:

The first issue and the approval in this sample are usually called Activity Steps, or Progress Steps. One
way of implementing this method is to limit ourselves to only entering these values; e.g. do not enter
any physical progress before the design is issued. By the time we issue the design, we can enter 80% as
the physical progress and again, we won’t increase it until it is approved, which makes our physical
progress 100%.

Primavera P6 has a feature which makes this kind of progressing easier. We can define the activity steps
and use them for entering progress and thus to update Physical % Complete on the activitiy. This will
prevent us from making mistakes by automatically limiting us to the predefined values.

The first thing to do is to get the settings right or specifically the setting which enables progress via
activity steps.
1) Click on the Projects item of the Enterprise menu to open the Projects window.

2) After selecting the project in the upper part of the window, the “Activity percent complete based on
activity steps”option should be activated to enable the activity steps. From now on, you cannot enter
manual physical % complete values for the activities which have defined steps. However, it’s still
possible to enter manual values for activities which do not have steps. So, don’t worry too much about
this setting; you can always keep it active.

The next thing to do is to define steps for the activities. The following screen shows a plan with two
activities.
The activity A1 is selected. The settings we will deal with are in the Steps Tab of the Details pane. If you
don’t have the pane, select View| Show on Bottom| Details. If you don’t have the Steps tab, right click
on a tab and select Customize Activity Details then activate the Steps item.

Now, it is time to define steps. Our sample steps are 80% progress for the first issue and the remaining
20% for the approval.

3) To add a new step, click on the Add button (bottom-left corner of the screen).
4) Enter the name of the step and repeat clicking on the Add button and entering the names for the rest
of the steps.
Now the two sample steps have been entered. These steps have the same weight now; each will
increase Physical % Complete by 50%.

5) In order to define other weights, right click on the Step Name heading (or any other headings) and
select Customize Step Columns. By this, a dialog box opens and the Step Weight column can be added
to the layout.

6) Now predefined progress of each step can be entered in the Step Weight column as shown.
Now we are finished defining the steps for activity A1.

You might have many activities with the same steps. In this case, select all steps of activity A1 (click on a
step, then press Ctrl+A keys to select all), then right click on a blank space of the steps pane and
select Create Template. By this, the following dialog box appears:
Enter a desired name (“General Design Steps” in this sample) and click on the OK button. Now a saved
template for these steps is created and available for further use.

Now let’s select activity A2.

7) This activity is supposed to have the same steps as activity A1. We can use the previously made
template to create them. Click on the Add From Template button and the following dialog box will
appear.
8) Double click on the General Design Steps item to continue.

The same steps are added to the activity.

Entering Physical % Complete

1) The first thing is to select the activity, go to the Status tab of the Details pane, check the Started
checkbox, and mark the activity as started. This means that the activity is started and ready to receive its
physical progress.
2) In this example, the activity A3 is marked as started. This activity does not have steps, so the Physical
% Complete can be entered manually. Simply click on the cell and enter the value.
For those activities which have steps (A1 and A2 in this sample), you cannot enter manual values and
should use the steps instead (only if you have activated the steps as described in the beginning of this
very article). In order to do so, go to the Steps tab of the Details pane after marking the activity as
started. Just check the Completed checkboxes of the completed steps.
Physical % Complete for WBS Elements
WBS elements usually roll-up the information of their underlying activities; e.g. the cost of a WBS
element is the sum of the costs of its children and its Start is equal to the minimum of the starts of its
children. The way each value is rolled-up depends on the type and nature of the value and even some of
them do not accept roll-ups by their nature. The Physical % Complete is one of those fields that are not
rolled-up, because it’s based on external parameters, unknown to the software, and there is no way of
equalizing them and providing a summarization.

The thing you should have in mind is that you are not supposed to use activity percent completes for the
WBS elements, even if they have rolled-up values (like Duration % Complete and Units % Complete). The
suitable field for this purpose is Performance % Complete which will be discussed in later articles.

Summary
The concept of the Physical % Complete is straightforward. It’s a way of entering manual progresses
based on expert judgment or other external factors. These values can be dynamically determined in
each control period or follow a predefined set of values (activity steps).
One last thing you should have in mind is that the planned progress, which is provided by the Schedule
% Complete and planned value fields, does not incorporate steps and is based on dates and units
(see Schedule % Complete article for more information). This can cause some amounts of false variation
between your actual progress and planned progress. These variations are usually too little to be taken
into consideration. But if you believe they are large for your project or you want to be as precise as
possible, you should avoid activity steps and decompose the activity into more simple activities which
are possible to be tracked based on duration or units.

Final Note
An interesting use of Physical % Complete is that you can have appropriate Global Changes in place,
which calculate progresses and put them in the field. Suppose you have more than one resource
assigned to each activity and are supposed to use one of them for the progress. An appropriate Global
Change can calculate the value automatically and enter it in the field. Another example is when you
need a Duration Percent Complete similar to that of Microsoft Project, which is based on the At
Completion Duration instead of Original Duration. You can have another Global Change to calculate this
value and present it as Physical % Complete.
The Concept of Units
As explained in the previous article on the Duration % Complete, there are three percent complete fields for each
activity:

 Duration % Complete
 Units % Complete
 Physical % Complete.
We’ve already covered Duration % Complete and Schedule % Complete. This post will explore Units % Complete
and future posts will continue to cover Physical % Complete, Activity % Complete and finally, Performance %
Complete.
Each assigned resource and assigned expense creates units in Primavera P6. The number of units depends on
duration of the activity and your current settings. However, Units % Complete is only depended on labor and
nonlabor units; material units and expense units are not used in calculating Units % Complete.

Assignments which create units:

 Resource assignments
 Labor Resources – are used to calculate Units % Complete
 Nonlabor Resources – are used to calculate Units % Complete

 Material Resources – are not used to calculate Units % Complete

 Expense assignments – are not used to calculate Units % Complete
If you are familiar with the Microsoft Project, it might help to say that P6’s units are similar to MSP’s work, and P6’s
Units % Complete is similar to MSP’s % Work Complete.

The Formula Used for Units % Complete

The Primavera P6 uses a simple and intuitive formula for Units % Complete of Activities with labor or non-labor
assignments:

[Units % Complete] = [Actual Units] / ([Actual Units] + [Remaining Units] )

Actual units is the sum of the labor units and nonlabor units, and remaining units is equal to the sum of the
remaining labor units and remaining nonlabor units.

It simply shows that how much of the units are actualized so far. The following figure shows a sample calculation.
As you can see in the previous figure, when the units are not distributed uniformly, the resulting Units % Complete
will not be equal to the ratio of the actual duration to the total duration.

The next animated figure shows the values of a sample activity in different times. We assume that the amount of
the actual units in each period is equal to the planned value of that period.

However, the above assumption is only for demonstration purposes and actual values are not usually equal to the
planned values in the real world and even the At Completion Duration might change regularly.
The following figure shows a sample executing which does not follow the plan. The redistribution of the units is
based on an imaginary tracking method and you should not worry about that; the only purpose of this figure is to
show the calculation of Units % Complete with changing values.

Units % Complete VS. Duration % Complete

There are two major differences between Units % Complete and Duration % Complete:

 When units are not distributed uniformly, the Units % Complete will not be uniform relative to the time
passed. The next figure compares these two percent complete types in a sample activity.
 Duration % Complete is calculated by the Original Duration, which can be different from At Completion
Duration (see previous article on Duration Percent Complete for more information), but the Units %
Complete is calculated by the current and At Completion values. Because of this, even if you have
uniform units, the Units % Complete might not be equal to the Duration % Complete. If your units are
uniform and you keep your Original Duration equal to the At Completion Duration, then your Duration %
Complete and Units % Complete would be the same.
Thus, the Duration % Complete is suitable for uniform and less-complicated work. Usually the more you
decompose your activities, the less complicated they will be. You also need resource allocations to use Units %
Complete.

Units % Complete for WBS Elements

The previous explanations were for activities’ Units % Complete. This field is calculated in the same way for WBS
Elements. However, I recommend you set appropriate percent complete types and Earned Value settings and then
use Performance % Complete for the WBS Elements instead of Units % Complete and Duration % Complete.

Samples
Now that you know the formula behind the Units % Complete, let’s have a final review by looking at some sample
screenshots of the Primavera P6.
This plan has only one activity. This activity has three resources, two labor and one nonlabor resource. Each
assignment has 32 units. One assignment’s curve is “Early Peak”, another is “At Start” and the third one’s curve
field is empty, which is equal to uniform distribution.
Let’s open the Activity Usage Spreadsheet in bottom:

Here we can see the amount of units planned for each period. Now assume that one day is passed according to
plan. I check the Actual Start checkbox of the activity, reschedule it for the second day, and input 3 days for the
Remaining Duration. This would be the result:
As you can see, we have some actual units in the first day and some remaining units in the remaining three days.
Calculate the parameters based on the data from the above figure:
Actual Units = 38.4h+8.0h = 46.4h
Remaining Units = 14.9h+8.0h+8.0h+8.0h+2.7h+8.0h = 49.6h
Units % Complete = 46.4h / (46.4h+49.6h) = 48.33%
Now let’s put the Gantt chart away and check the Units % Complete field in the table:

The current Units % Complete is, as we calculated before, 48.33%, which is much higher than the current Duration
% Complete (25%). That’s because our units were not uniform. We can check the units’ distribution in the Activity
Usage Profile view:
 The above figure shows the distribution of the Labor units. Nonlabor units are shown in the next figure:

Aggregation of these two profiles is still front loaded, which causes the Units % Complete to have a higher value in
the first day.

Summary
The Units % Complete is one of the three types of activity progress fields, besides Duration % Complete and
Physical % Complete. You should select suitable percent complete type of each activity and its value will be
reflected in Activity % Complete. This value will be aggregated based on many settings and preferences and shape
the final output: the Performance % Complete. Performance % Complete is the final field, used for actual
progress.