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Tracking Execution with Actuals

A professional plan is only as good as its alignment with reality. While the scheduling engine provides the Planned Work, the Actuals system integrates your team's real-world effort directly from Jira.

By aggregating posted worklogs, MSP Planner allows you to move from "predictive planning" to "fact-based governance."

The "Reality Gap"​

The core value of tracking Actuals is identifying the Reality Gap: the difference between how much effort you planned for a task and how much effort was actually spent.

  • Planned Work: The theoretical effort required to complete a task, based on your scheduling mode and resource units.
  • Actual Work: The sum of all worklogs posted by your team in Jira for that specific issue.

When the Actual Work exceeds the Planned Work, you have a "Reality Gap." This is an early warning signal that your estimates are too optimistic, your scope is creeping, or your resources are less efficient than assumed.

How it Works: Automated Integration​

You don't need to manually enter hours into the timeline. MSP Planner handles the heavy lifting automatically:

1. Registry-Driven Collection​

The tool only tracks actuals for Reference Tasks (tasks linked to real Jira issues). It uses the Task Sync Registry to identify exactly which issue keys to query in Jira.

2. Live Worklog Aggregation​

When you enable the Actuals Toggle, the app performs a high-performance fetch of all worklogs associated with your linked tasks. It aggregates these entries into a normalized "Actuals Cache," which then feeds into the resource views and task bars.

3. Resource-Centric Visibility​

Actuals are not just shown on tasks; they are projected onto the Resource Histogram. This allows you to see:

  • Actual Utilization: Exactly how many hours a specific person spent on a task during a given period.
  • Effort Leakage: Where resources are spending time on tasks that aren't on the critical path.

Using Actuals in Your Workflow​

Visualizing Actuals on the Timeline​

When the Actuals Toggle is active, the timeline renders "Actual Work" bars. By comparing these to the planned bars, you can instantly see if a task is "over-burning" its budget before it even reaches its finish date.

Analyzing the Resource Histogram​

In the Resource View, Actuals are overlaid on the capacity chart. This allows you to perform Fact-Based Re-planning:

  1. Identify the Gap: Find a resource who is consistently over-allocated because their "Actuals" are higher than "Planned."
  2. Adjust the Model: Increase the Planned Work or extend the Duration of the task to reflect the real-world effort.
  3. Re-stabilize the Schedule: Use the scheduling engine to see how this "reality correction" impacts your project finish date and the critical path.

Technical Note: Reliability & Performance​

To ensure the system remains performant even for projects with thousands of worklogs:

  • Delta Syncing: The tool prefers "Delta" updates, only fetching worklogs for newly added tasks or updated periods.
  • Server-Originated Timestamps: All actuals are stamped with server-originated modification times to ensure the data is consistent across all users.
  • Automatic Paging: The app handles Jira's pagination limits automatically, ensuring that every single second of posted work is accounted for, no matter how large the history.