Statusing refers to the practice of applying actual dates, costs, and hours to the project. This is when your planned schedule begins to reflect what actually happened on the project. This can mean simply updating actual start and/or finish dates and remaining durations for activities, or updating hours worked and remaining hours for resources, or updating completed activity percentage. But often the situation is more complicated than that and a number of questions must be considered:
Who will perform the updates?
How will the data be entered?
How often will updates take place?
What metrics will be used so that all team members view project status in the same way?
The answers to these questions will vary widely between companies, and will even vary among different types of projects at the same company. However, for any specific project, status updates should be performed consistently throughout the project's lifetime.
There are conceptually three ways you can apply actuals...