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
Add a Milestone default calculated series
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.
Click on System Settings
Open System Setup
Select Project Evaluation from Enterprise Features
From Project Evaluation 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 your new default series name, for example, ‘Percent Complete.’
Select the Data Type for this new default series, for example, ‘Percentage.’
Click on the Calculations tab
Choose Reference Series as the Calculation Type
Choose Current Element as the Element
Click on Calculated Percent Complete as the Reference Field
Once you are done with your changes, click Save
Add Initiative and Milestones
Next, you will want to create an initiative with milestones.
Select Scorecard & Elements from your Control Panel
Click Manage Elements
Click on Initiatives
Click on the Plus icon
Under Name, enter the new milestone name, for example, ‘Add Website.’
Once you are done with your changes, click Save
From your Initiatives locate the one you created in the previous step and click the Pencil icon
Click on the Milestones tab
Click on the Plus icon
Under Name, enter the new milestone name, for example, ‘Create New Website Structure.’
Click Save
Rolling up the Milestone Percent Complete to the Initiative
Add an Initiative default Series
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 System Settings
Click on System Setup
Click on Project Evaluation
Click on the Initiatives tab
Click on the Plus icon to set up a default series for your Initiatives element
Under Default Series Name enter the new Series name, for example, ‘Percent Complete.’
Under Data Type, select Percentage
Once you are done with your changes, 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.
Add an Initiative Default Series Calculation
Go to your Initiative with the milestones you’d like to aggregate
Click the Pencil icon to edit the Initiative
Click on the Calculation tab
Select Aggregate Series
For this example, use the following values:
Under Scorecard select Elements in all Scorecards
Under Aggregate Element select Initiative
Under Select Initiatives select All Initiatives
On Series Name Match Type select Series name equals…
Under Series Name enter the series name, in this example ‘Percent Complete.’
Under Aggregate Type select Average (Mean)
Once you are done with your changes, click on Save
Initiative evaluation
Add an Initiative Default Series
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 Plus icon
Under Default Series Name, enter the new default series name, in this example, ‘Calculated Percent Complete.’
Select Percentage as the Data Type
Click on the Calculations tab
Under Calculation Type select Reference Series
Under Element select Current Element
Under Reference Field select Calculated Percent Complete
Once you are done with your changes, click on Save
Add an Initiative Evaluation
Once this series is set up, click the Pencil icon next to the Percent Complete series
Click on the Evaluation tab
Set up your desired evaluation criteria
This example shows that if:
The ‘Percent complete’ is greater than or equal to the ‘Calculated Percent Complete’, it will evaluate as green.
The ‘Percent complete’ is 90% or higher of the ‘Calculated Percent Complete’ value, it will evaluate as yellow.
If the ‘Percent complete’ is lower than 90% of the ‘Calculated Percent Complete’, it will evaluate as red.
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.
