Project Time Management Tracking

Cost Management Lessons Learned Work Breakdown Structures (WBS)

Michael King

Community Champion

Senior IS Project Manager| Baycare Health Systems Clearwater, Fl, United States

As Project Managers we spend a great deal of time creating the Project schedule, including defining all of the tasks, sequencing these activities, and estimating the resource requirements and task duration. as we manage the project we updating the progress of all of these activities.

What is the best practice of tracking the actual time that was used to complete a task and then compare it to the estimate ?

Posted: Mar 12, 2026 10:07 AM

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Rami Kaibni

Community Champion

Senior Projects Manager | Field & Marten Associates New Westminster, British Columbia, Canada

Michael, one of the best practices for comparing estimated and actual task duration is to use real-time metrics by tracking the actual time spent on tasks as work progresses. Team members log their hours in a time-tracking or project management system, allowing the project manager to continuously compare actual effort against the original estimates in the schedule. This real-time visibility helps identify variances early, supports timely adjustments to resources or timelines, and creates historical data that can improve the accuracy of future project estimates.

Posted: Mar 12, 2026 12:38 PM

Sergio Luis Conte Helping to create solutions for everyone| Worldwide based Organizations Buenos Aires, Argentina

It will depends on the method you are using to create the solution. But today, you can use generative AI to support all what you stated above. No matter than most of us are using AI sometimes without notice that because it is embedded into the tools we use.

Posted: Mar 13, 2026 5:34 AM

Stephen Vinck Project Manager / Solutions Architect| Guardian Group Fatum Curacao, Curaçao

How about when you're working with a vendor that don't really log their time spend in a time tracking / pm tool?

Posted: Mar 13, 2026 8:43 AM

Michael King

Community Champion

Senior IS Project Manager| Baycare Health Systems Clearwater, Fl, United States

Stephen Vinck Most of the projects that I support include Vendors. In some cases the vendor support is part of the contract and we do not have a business need to track hours since the cost is already baked into the contract. There are other times where the vendor is on an hourly rate and in these cases we have tracked hours weekly for each of the vendor employees and used that to reconcile with the invoices from the vendor.

Posted: Mar 13, 2026 1:31 PM

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Project Time Management Tracking

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