I’m often asked how Deltek Cobra handles the cumulative percent complete values of multiple activities when they are part of a single work package. This article looks at a simple test that shows how the percent complete values of several activities get rolled up into a single work package when integrated into Deltek Cobra.
Question Details
You have several activities in a project schedule that are all part of a single EVM work package. As the activities get progressed in the schedule, how does Deltek Cobra calculate the overall percent complete value for the work package they are all part of?
The Scenario
You have several activities in a schedule that are all part of an EVM work package. In the example below you can see that for activities are mapped to work package 1.1.3. Each activity is 10 days long giving a linear total of 40 days spanning a 30 day period.
Each of the activities has an Engineer assigned in the Resources tab at 80 hours giving a total of 320 hours.
The Question
How will Cobra deal with this “Many-to-one” situation where multiple activities will be providing Physical % Complete values as the work progresses? Well let’s see shall we?
Initial Integration
Upon initial integration, Deltek Cobra creates control account 1.1 with a single % Complete EVT work package below it. It also loads the sum of all the Engineer hours and dollars for each activity’s resource assignments: in this case 320 Engineer hours.
When Work Begins…
What we want to know is how Cobra is going to calculate the % Complete values as the activities are progressed in the schedule.
Let’s now say that after the first reporting period, activity A is 100% complete and activity B is 50% complete. A total of 15 days physical % complete has been achieved out of a total of 40 days’ work. That’s 37.50% of the total work required to complete the work package.
After Loading Status
Now we advance the data date in the scheduling tool and do the same in Cobra to align the status dates.
Next we perform as status integration and see how Cobra handled the multiple activity percent complete values.
The Results
After the integration, Deltek Cobra has calculated the total % Complete value at the expected 37.50%. The work package is functioning as a rollup for the four activities back in the scheduling tool.
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