Data Management Capabilities > Managing Projects > Classic Plans > Classic Plan Objects > Classic Activities and Summary Activities
  
Classic Activities and Summary Activities
An activity is a specific step within a plan that contains information, such as duration and effort. A summary activity is a parent activity of several related children activities, milestones, or other summary activities.
An activity can be a "child" of a summary activity. An activity is often associated to one or more deliverables. Summary activities contain, summarize, and calculate status for a set of child activities.
The activity status is calculated using a pessimistic approach. If any child deliverable is "red" or any child activity is "red," the parent activity health status is "red." If the status of no child is "red" but one or more is "yellow," then the status of the parent activity is "yellow." If the status of all children is "green," then the parent activity status is also "green."
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There is no propagation of deliverable risk values to an associated parent activity risk value.
When cost and effort are not automatically tracked, the percentage of work complete status for a summary activity with several child activities is weighted based on the percentage of work complete and duration of each of the child activities.
When cost and effort are automatically tracked, the percentage of work complete status for a summary activity with several child activities is simply the ratio of total actual effort for all the activities to the total estimated effort.