Plan vs. Actual Comparison
in projects

Plan versions: the original plan stays the yardstick

At project start the plan state is saved as a baseline. Every later replan creates a new state, and that state is the actual. In the bar chart both rows sit directly on top of each other: the target date from the baseline above the current actual date, per task.

Several plan states can be kept side by side and activated individually for comparison. That makes it readable how far a project has drifted from its first plan – and whether that came from a decision or crept in over twenty small shifts.

If a replan turns out to have been a mistake, you jump back to the earlier state: the plan is versioned, not overwritten. On the right of the image are the saved states, below them the utilisation of the departments involved – overload in red.

Scenarios: possible target states against the actual

A possible solution is not written into the live plan but next to it. Hiring, outsourcing, moving tasks, running overtime or weekend shifts, shifting load to other teams: every variant is stored as its own scenario and keeps its own schedule and its own utilisation.

A scenario is therefore a possible target state held against the current actual state – what outsourcing does to the end date, what the extra shift buys, which other projects a reallocation hits.

In the image the baseline plan (scenario A) and the rescheduling (scenario B) sit on top of each other in the same bar chart, the comparison columns give the date per scenario, the red bar marks the task running out of plan. Because the variants stay side by side, the decision is a choice between calculated alternatives. What a shift triggers across the portfolio is covered under multi-project management.

Post-calculation: what the project gives the next one

The last comparison runs before a project is closed: original plan against actual course. How high the schedule adherence was, how well the calculated resources held, and where exactly the plan came apart.

The value shows up in the next quotation. If you know that commissioning ran over the calculation across several machines, you calculate the next one differently. Without this step the experience stays with the people who were there and leaves with the next change of staff.

All three rest on the same mechanism: a plan state against an actual state, at a cut-off date. What that means exactly and what has to be in place for it is covered in the sections that follow.

Feedback instead of status chasing

The actual status is created where the work happens. Employees report their tasks back through task tracking – design engineers on the desktop, fitters and field technicians on the mobile app. Progress is therefore not a collected figure from the weekly round, but a continuous data stream at task level.

59% of customers named manual status chasing as one of their starting problems, multiple answers possible – meaning the round of phone calls to every department before each meeting. Feedback in task management replaces exactly that step: the project manager does not ask for the status, they read it. The meeting then starts at the decision, not at data collection.

How far a task has drifted from the plan is visible directly in the bar chart; how tasks, dependencies and milestones are shown is described on the page about the Gantt chart. For the assessment, one simple rule has proven itself in practice: a variance that touches a milestone or a downstream task is decided immediately. Everything else is watched until the trend points the same way across two cut-off dates. That holds for dates and progress – for effort in hours, reliability depends on a second source.

A plan vs. actual comparison looks backwards – the value comes from the forecast

A plan vs. actual comparison answers a question about the past: what was planned, and what happened? That is necessary, but it does not steer anything yet. The steering question is a different one: when will we finish on this trajectory – and which other projects does that hit?

That is why Linetrack carries the measured deviation forward. Hours consumed and reported progress produce a remaining effort, that effort is set against the department's remaining capacity, and the result is a new completion date. Because the same departments work across several projects, the shift becomes visible immediately in multi-project management – as a spike in the affected department's capacity histogram, not as a footnote in one project report.

The chosen variant goes back into the plan and becomes the new target for the next round – the point where the measurement turns into a yardstick again. How dates and capacities run together natively is described under scheduling and capacity planning in one system. Which figures fall out of each round is covered in the section below.