BUG: Parent % incorrectly calculated when using "elapsed duration"

A useful feature of SmartSheet that we often is "elapsed durations", e.g. instead of using 30d to indicate "30 working days" you can enter e30d to indicate "30 calendar days". ( for more info search for "elapsed" in this article). We use this a lot for durations that need to ignore holidays and weekends.

The problem is that there's a bug in the way the parent task's percentage is automatically calculated when making use of this. The screenshot below shows how this is an issue. In all three cases below, the project is clearly 50% complete but the two cases using the "elapsed duration" feature show 72% instead:

Is this a bug or am I missing something?

Regards,

Mark

Screen Shot 2017-04-05 at 3.40.21 PM.png

Find more posts tagged with

Comments

Shaine Greenwood

Hi Mark,

To clarify, this is expected behavior in the application, not a bug.

The percent complete is taking into account your elapsed duration when calculating the weighted percent complete. % complete in a parent row is calculated by the duration and % complete of all of your child tasks.

Each week-long task is 5 working days long, assuming you have Saturday and Sunday as non-working days.

Each elapsed duration week-long task is 7 "working" days long (since it ignores non-working days), which gives it more weight.

MarkSilberbauer

Hi Shaine,

Thanks for looking into this.

Yes, the percentage is calculated using weighting, but in my example, only one of the tasks uses elapsed time so only one weekend is involved here. That's just 2 days difference. How does adding 2 days out of a month make the overall % progress jump from 50% to 72%?

Look at this simple example:

Case 1: I've performed one day's work out of 10 available days. It calculates 10% complete. Good.

Case 2: I've performed one day's work out of 10 available days. It calculates a whopping 25% complete. Even if you want to count the weekend as part of the available days (which is incorrect) then I've completed 1 day out of 12 available days meaning the percentage should be even less (8.3%). How does 25% progress make sense here?

This doesn't just affect contrived cases like the ones above. I came across this because so many of our %'s on our plans were non-sensical. I stopped using the % complete column altogether until I realised it was the "elapsed time" items causing the problem.

Regards,

Mark

Screen Shot 2017-04-07 at 3.31.16 PM.png