In this article on calculating progress, the term project and parent activity can be used interchangeably, since the elements used to calculate progress roll up to the top or upper level elements (sub activities roll up to parent activities which in turn roll up to the project).

If a project has activities with sub-activities the former's progress will be based on that of their sub-activities, and in turn the project's progress will be based on the parent activities' progress.

Any sub-activities of the project’s activities are not included in the calculation.

Easy Projects rounds the results of progress calculation to the lower integer, e.g. 19.88 will be rounded to 19, not 20 as one would expect. This is based on the consideration that an unfinished 1% of a job cannot be considered a whole 1% in any case. 

Project named ‘Web Site’ has 2 activities: ‘Design’ and ‘Development’. The Development activity in turn has 3 sub-activities, as in the picture:

In calculating completion rate of Web Site project it is only Design and Development activities that will be used.

All activities will be included in the project’s progress calculation, using one of the formula combinations below.

When calculating project completion rate, the following formula is used:

where Pi is the completion rate (progress) of the i-th top level activity, and Hi is its estimated hours. But, if estimated hours are not specified (or zero) for an activity, then EP will check to see if duration can be used, instead, or actual hours, if neither estimated nor duration are present (or set to zero). In cases where all three are greater than zero, then EP will always use estimated hours in the calculations. For the case when none of these elements is specified (or all set to zero), see below.

Special Cases in Calculating Project Progress

1. If an activity has neither estimated hours, nor duration, nor actual hours specified (or set to zero), the maximum Hi is used.
2. If all the activities have neither estimated hours, nor duration, nor actual hours specified (or set to zero), the above formula has a simpler form:

where Pi is the completion rate (progress) of the i-th top level activity, and i is the number of the activities used in the calculation.

Project has 2 activities: one has 25 estimated hours and a completion rate of 5%, the other – 30 and 10%, respectively.

According to the formula, the project completion rate will be:

(25 x 5 + 30 x 10)/(25 + 30) = 7.72.

Since completion rates are given in integers, the project will have 7% as its completion rate. See the second note above.