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Project Stage Timeline using 100 % Stacked Bar Chart

Inkey Solutions, June 20, 20251044 Views

Managing large-scale projects often involves multiple moving parts, especially when tasks span across various project stages. To ensure smooth execution, it’s vital to track not just the progress of individual tasks, but also how much each stage of the project is progressing based on these tasks.

In this blog, we’ll look at how to use a 100% Stacked Bar Chart in Power BI to track stage-level completion based on task status — giving you a powerful and intuitive visual to monitor project health.

Why Use a 100% Stacked Bar Chart?

• It normalizes progress, regardless of how many tasks exist per stage.
• Offers instant comparison between stages.
• Visually highlights completion imbalance, allowing project managers to act proactively.

Objective:

The goal of this visual is to provide project managers and stakeholders with a clear, actionable snapshot of how much work has been completed across different project stages, using task-level data. By aggregating task statuses and plotting them by stage, this visualization enables more effective planning, timely intervention, and improved overall project tracking.

Steps to plot the Visual :

Step 1: Prepare Your Data

Make sure your data model has:

• A task table with columns:
  • Task ID
  • Status (e.g., Planning, In Progress, On Hold, Done)
  • Project stage ID

• A Project stage table with:
  • Stage Name
  • Stage ID

 

Step 2: Create Task Completion Measures

Open Power BI and create the following two DAX measures in your task table:

• Stage Completion:

The Stage Completion DAX measure calculates the percentage of tasks marked as “Done” out of all tasks. It shows how much of each project stage is             complete based on task status.

Measure : DIVIDE (

COUNTROWS(

FILTER(

Task,

Task[Status] = “Done”

)

),

COUNTROWS(Task)

) * 100

• Stage Pending :

The Stage Pending measure simply calculates the remaining percentage of work that hasn’t been completed in each stage. It subtracts the Stage                  Completion percentage from 100, giving you the pending or incomplete portion of tasks within each project stage. This complements the                              completion metric and helps in building a full 100% stacked bar visual showing both completed and pending progress.

 

Measure : Stage Pending =

100 – [Stage Completion]

Step 3: Create the Visual

• Go to the Report View in Power BI.
• Click on the 100% Stacked Bar Chart from the Visualizations pane.

 

• Drag the following fields into the visual:
  • Y-Axis: Stage Name

• • X-Axis / Values: Add both above DAX measures:
    • Task Completion %
    • Task Pending %

• Add Data Labels from the Format pane for better readability.

• Customize the colors:
  • Blue for Completion

• • Navy or dark color for Pending

 

Conclusion

In conclusion, visualizing task progress across project stages using a 100% stacked bar chart provides a clear and intuitive snapshot of overall project health. By comparing completed and pending tasks within each stage, teams can quickly identify bottlenecks, prioritize efforts, and maintain better control over timelines. This approach not only enhances transparency but also supports data-driven decision-making for efficient project execution and resource allocation.