Hi! I'm new to PM and would like to get some tips on how to determine tasks percentage completion Saving Changes...
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Wayne MackRetired| RetiredSouth Riding, Va, United States
My preference is to decompose tasks to a highly granular level (1/2 - 5 days) and then only evaluate the bottom level tasks as 0% or 100%. Roll ups to the higher levels will now (more) accurately represent their completion levels.
Though most people are extremely honest in trying to report their effort, they usually find it quite difficult to express a percent completed. Make it easy for everyone and let them report tasks as either "done" or "not done".
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Darren KosaPlanning & Controls ContractorHampshire, United Kingdom
Hi,
Percentage complete is easier to gauge depending on the type and complexity of the activity.
If you have produced 1000 widgets on a production run of 4000, then assuming your production rate remains constant, it is a relatively safe to say that the task is 25% complete. However, using that method to realise how close your team is to completing an Architectural Design Document wouldn’t be sensible.
I would agree with Wayne, it may help decomposing the task into sub-tasks, giving you a yardstick to accurately measure progress against. In the past I’ve also used actual (effort / duration) and remaining (effort / duration) to calculate a tasks percentage complete, although that method is still subjective.
As an aside, have you thought about Earned Value? The approach, metrics and terminology may be a bit daunting for the uninitiated, but you could look at the discrete EV techniques used to determine progress and get an idea of how to report percentage complete on your projects.
Wayne has great suggestions. Decompose the work into small, granular, measurable pieces. Mark them as either not started, started, or complete. People tend to mis-report the percent complete.
You can create top-level measures of percent complete for a phase or a project, but I recommend against it. People start doing all sorts of bad math to try to figure out if you are ahead or behind. Earned Value is a great tool to create auditable, well-justified numbers showing schedule and budget and scope accomplishments.
I recommend looking at actual and projected variances instead of percent complete. Re-forecast your scheduled end-date and final budget on a regular basis. Measure the expected variance between your final target and your expected actual budget or end-date.
After all, your sponsor should not really care about "percent complete". What good is a product that is 90% complete, anyway? More important is knowing how much it will cost when it is 100% complete, when it will be complete, and how much MORE time and money is required to get to 100%. Saving Changes...
Alex, Wayne, and Darren all provided good approaches for understanding how complete tasks are. But if you are looking for a way to estimate how complete a task is based on less than factual data, or to develop a projected completion date, there are some assumptions that can be used. For example - for planning purposes only - any Started Task can be considered to be either 0%, 50%, or 100% complete, depending on how you want to report it.
Some PM's use the 0% complete - but I think that skews the results negatively - similarly, the 100% skews to results positively. I like to use 50% - Bland - I know, but I don't have to know the exact amount of time that has been expended on each started task to determine an estimate of my overall level of project % complete.
If you're trying to do Earned Value analysis - then forget about % complete and get the actual numbers. Trying to figure out where you are in the project cycle from % complete will always be an estimate and may mislead you into thinking that you're better/worse off than you are.
Bottom line: Pick % that best represents your organization's approach to the work, and use that. If you really want to know where the project is use Earned Value.
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Gilbert AndersonSoftware Director| Williams InternationalMadison, Al, United States
Like Wayne, I like to break the project down to many small tasks. Then I ask how many more days it would take to complete each task. If it takes 5 more days to complete a task, and 10 days were allocated for that task, the task is 50% complete. In my expereience, this had the added benefit of reinforcing the sense of commitment to the task completion date. Saving Changes...
Michael WellesManaging Director| EdWel Project and Risk Management TrainingChicago, Il, United States
Consider using just three percentages - 0%, 25% and 100%. At zero, the task has not started. At twenty-five, the task has started and can be anywhere in the process (be sure to define what the team means by start). Finally one hundred percent means that the task is complete.
