Formulas and functions for tracking delays

The Love Consortium

Hello! I would love some guidance on if there are any formulas or functions that are useful for tracking delays with a project. More specifically, our organization is hoping to track who was responsible for the initial and subsequent delays with a project.

In our sheet, we have columns for: Task, Assigned To (Dropdown), Start Date, End Date, Status (Not Started, In Progress, Complete), Deadline Met (Check Y/N), Reason for Delay (Dropdown), and Prior Task Owner (Dropdown). Currently, we manually update all of these columns (e.g., we select the Prior Task Owner from the dropdown list if the Reason for Delay is Preceding Task Delayed). Is there a formula we could use (in conjunction with the Predecessor column?) that can automatically select the Prior Task Owner of the Preceding Task?

I'd also love to hear any thoughts you may all have on how to capture a "Cascading Effect." For example, Person A might have been responsible for the delay with the Preceding Task, but they may have been delayed by Person B with the task before that.

darkmatter

hey

• Simplest solution would be to establish a baseline on your plan so you can track target vs actual dates.
• Create baseline start/end date columns
• Set baseline
• Insert a ‘variance’ column, which uses NETWORKDAYS formula to track no. of days difference between actual / baseline.
• Run a report: have it filtered by variance greater than 0, sort into date order.
• The row at the top will tell you the root cause of the slippage.

Hope that helps. Let me know if you need any guidance.

Matt