Setting up a milestone roll-up using project evaluations

This article walks through how to evaluate an initiative or project based on an average of its milestones’ percent completion.

Evaluating a project based on milestone percent completion will help you keep track of how your project is progressing. It is important to note that ClearPoint project elements are designed to help you manage long-term, strategic initiatives, rather than day-to-day projects.

Before getting started, you will want to make sure project evaluations are enabled in your account. For more information on this, please read our Project Evaluations Care Package article.

Enabling project evaluations for milestones

First, we need to enable project evaluations for milestones to capture the percent complete field as a series in the data table. Project evaluations allow project based elements, like Initiatives and milestones to have series in a data table. Open on System Settings in the control panel and click on Admin Options.

Under Enterprise Features, click on Project Evaluations.

Click on the Milestones tab. Then click the plus icon to set up a default series for your Milestones element. Under Default Series Name, enter “Percent Complete.” Under Data Type, select Percentage.

Click on the Calculations tab. Choose Reference Series as the Calculation Type. Choose Current Element as the Element and Percent Complete as the Reference Field. Click Save. When a user updates the Percent Complete field on a milestone, our new Percent Complete series will update to this value.

Next, you will want to create milestones for your initiative. Check out this support article for more detailed instructions on how to do this.

Rolling up the milestone percent complete to the initiative

After adding milestones to our Initiative, we need to enable project evaluations for Initiatives. This will allow us to aggregate the milestone Percent Complete series at the Initiative level. Open on System Settings in the control panel and click on Admin Options.

Under Enterprise Features, click on Project Evaluations.

Click on the Initiatives tab and click on the plus icon to set up a default series for your Initiatives element. Under Default Series Name, enter “Percent Complete.” Under Data Type, select Percentage. Click Save. We’ve added this default series without a calculation. In the next steps, we will add a calculation that aggregates the milestone Percent Complete values for our specific Initiative.

Go to your Initiative with the milestones you’d like to aggregate and click the pencil icon to edit the initiative.

Click on the Series tab and edit the Percent Complete series. Click on the Calculation tab to set up an Aggregate Series calculation. Check out this article for more explanation on how this calculation type works. For this example, this is how you would set up the calculation:

a) Aggregate Element = Initiative

b) Select Initiatives = Milestones of this Initiative

c) Series Name Match Type = Series name equals…

d) Series Name = Percent Complete

e) Aggregate Type = Average (Mean)

Evaluating the initiative

After creating the milestone Percent Complete series and aggregating the Percent Complete at the Initiative level, we can automatically evaluate this Initiative based on the series. To do this, we will create another series at the Initiative level named Calculated Percent Complete. This Calculated Percent Complete field will serve as our “target” percent complete for the Initiative.

Click the pencil icon to edit the Initiative.

Click on the Series tab and click on the plus icon to add the new series. Under name, enter “Calculated Percent Complete.” Select Percentage for the Data Type. Click on the Calculations tab and set up a Reference Series calculation that references the Calculated Percent Complete field. This field calculates how far along your project should be based on the start and end dates. Click Save.

Once this series is set up, click the pencil icon next to the Percent Complete series and click into the Evaluation tab. Set up your desired evaluation criteria. This example shows that if:

a) the ‘Percent complete’ is greater than or equal to the ‘Calculated Percent Complete’, it will evaluate as green.

b) the ‘Percent complete’ is 90% or higher of the ‘Calculated Percent Complete’ value, it will evaluate as yellow;

c) and if the ‘Percent complete’ is lower than 90% of the ‘Calculated Percent Complete’, it will evaluate as red.

d) Any blank values will show as blue.

Check the option to ‘Use this series for overall element evaluation’ to apply this evaluation to your initiative and click Save.

Your evaluation has now been applied to the Initiative and your status indicators will automatically populate based on the Percent Complete series.