Best Practices: Project Updates

Envisio Projects automatically calculate progress percentage based on task completion, but we also very strongly recommend providing a narrative update to your projects to explain the progress changes. This is critical for Projects that have been linked to Plans, in order for the Project's updates to display in Envisio reporting.

There are two scenarios when you should provide a project update:

1. When there is a substantial update related to project progress.
2. When tasks have been completed, added, or removed.

Project updates will not be visible on your Projects Dashboard, however if the project is linked to an Envisio Plan, the update will be visible via reporting and the Plan's public dashboard, if enabled.

Project Update Recommended

Envisio will automatically generate a system update each time the project's progress percentage is changed; i.e. after there is some progress (over 0%), whenever a task is created, completed, or deleted. When any of these changes happen, Envisio will indicate a project update is recommended by highlighting an orange update indicator at the top of the tasks page and showing the same indicator (in grey ) on the Project listing page. It is then up to the project manager to edit the system update or write a new update on the project, ideally before the linked plan's reporting date.

Ready to submit your update? Please refer to How To: Provide a Project Update.

Substantial progress update to be shared

Whenever you achieve a big milestone in your project or have a substantial update to share, simply provide an update on your project.

Task Modifications

Creating, adding, or removing tasks on your project will automatically impact the project's progress, and thus should always be accompanied by a project update.

Let's think of an example. If your project has 4 tasks, each of those four tasks being completed would increment the project's progress by 25%; once the four tasks are complete, so is the project! If two of the four tasks have been completed, the project is currently 50% complete. If you add a new task, the calculation updates: each task is now worth 20% of the project's overall progress (100% divided by 5 tasks). If the same two tasks remain completed, you now have 2/5 of your tasks complete, meaning the project's completion has now automatically dropped to 40%. For this reason, it's important to provide an update each time you modify tasks in your project. 

For Projects that are linked to Plans in Envisio, the status and progress values from the project will be rolled up to the plan's overall status and progress. As you may know, any time a plan receives an update, it's accompanied by a narrative update; as updates aren't a requirement in Projects, the system will automatically generate a generic narrative update to pass to the Plan within two hours of any task modifications. 

To avoid this automated updated entry, simply provide an update to your Project each time tasks are completed or modified.