Project reality

Project reality is a project-level view built from the work recorded in the project. It compares reported progress with the progress the evidence supports, rolls items up into workstreams, finds the critical path, forecasts completion from how long comparable work has actually taken, and scores risk out of 100, always listing the factors behind the score. Nobody has to write a status update for any of it.

Who can use it#

Reality has to be switched on for your organization. It’s on by default. If an administrator has turned it off, the page says No reality for this project. See Reality settings.

Open a project’s reality#

1. Open the project

   Go to Projects and select the project.

2. Select Reality in the project header

   The page opens with the project’s name and key. Select Back to the project to return.

You can also reach any project’s reality page from The state of everything, where each project name links here.

The headline figures#

Next to the Project reality heading, badges show how many items are blocked and how many are stale. Below that are three figures:

Reported

Progress as the items’ statuses describe it, rolled up across the project.

Evidence-supported

Progress backed by recorded data such as finished sub-items, ticked checklists, time logged against estimates, finished blocking items and approvals. If nothing in the project can measure progress yet, this reads No evidence rather than 0%.

Divergence

Reported minus evidence, in percentage points, calculated over the same items. A positive number means the statuses are ahead of what the evidence supports.

How an individual item’s figures are calculated is explained in How evidence is calculated.

Risk#

The Risk card shows a score out of 100 and, directly underneath, every factor that produced it, with the factor’s value and weight and a sentence explaining it. The score is the weighted average of the factors that could be measured.

A factor that can’t be measured for this project is listed under Not counted, because it could not be measured, with the reason, and is left out of the weighting instead of being scored as zero. For example, a project with no capacity data doesn’t have comfortable headroom; it has no capacity data. If no factor can be measured, the card reads Not enough to score.

Forecast completion#

The Forecast completion card works out a completion date from how long comparable items have actually taken in your organization. Comparable means the same work item type. The card shows one of three things:

• A date, with the explanation and the P50 cycle time and P85 cycle time (working days per item) it’s based on.
• Insufficient history, with how many comparable completed items exist out of the 20 needed. No date is shown anywhere on the page in this state.
• An explanation that there’s nothing outstanding, when the project has no remaining work.

Under the forecast, Planned end shows the latest due date among the project’s unfinished items, with a note on how it was worked out. Projects don’t have a separate planned-end field. If no unfinished item has a due date, there’s no planned end, and the “Forecast against the planned end” risk factor isn’t counted.

Critical path#

The Critical path card shows the longest chain of dependent work that has to happen in order before the project can finish. Its headline is the remaining effort, for example “46h across 7 item(s)”, and the items on the path are listed in order with their estimates. Finished items on the path are struck through, and each item links to the work item.

• If items on the path have no estimate, the card says so, and the hours figure is a minimum rather than a total. If none have estimates, it shows the item count with “no estimates”.
• Hours already logged aren’t subtracted. An item that has used 12 hours of an 8-hour estimate still has work left; its estimate was just wrong.
• If items depend on each other in a loop, the card says These items depend on each other in a loop and no critical path is shown until the loop is fixed.

History#

The History table lists up to the last 30 recorded days, with the reported and evidence percentages, blocked and stale counts, and the risk score for each. A snapshot is written once a day by the automatic full recompute, and each day’s risk factors are kept with its score, so older figures can still be explained.

• Recorded days are never rewritten. Running a recompute later the same day doesn’t change that day’s row.
• A day on which no recompute ran has no row. The gap is left as a gap rather than filled in.
• How long history is kept depends on your organization’s retention policy. See Governance.

Workstreams#

The Workstreams card groups the project’s items so you can see which parts of the work have evidence behind them.

1. Choose a grouping

   Select By type to group by work item type, or By tag to group by tag. Items with no tag get their own “No tag” group, so the workstreams always add up to the whole project.

2. Read each row

   Each workstream shows its item count, blocked and stale counts, the reported and evidence percentages and the divergence. A note says how many items the evidence figure rests on, for example “The evidence figure rests on 12 of 20 item(s)”. Items with nothing to measure are left out rather than counted as zero.

What this view can’t show#

A card titled What this view cannot show, and why lists the things the page deliberately doesn’t offer. For example, there’s no grouping by team, because a work item records an assignee rather than a team, and grouping by team would amount to a per-person statistic.

The footer says when the oldest figure in the rollup was computed and which business calendar is used to count working days.

FAQ#

Related pages#

• Reality
• The state of everything
• Projects
• Business calendars