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Project / Task progress report – can a task be 90% done?

28 November 2009

Craig Brown hates it when he sees people report their work was 90% done for weeks in a row.

The question is whether or not it is possible for a task to be 90% complete. When considering a completion of a Work Package, work is either Done or it is Not Done. My favorite approach for progress monitoring is as follows:

Before work commences progress is obviously 0%.

When work commences, progress is recorded as 50%, and remains so until the complete work is done.

Once the task is fully complete progress is recorded as 100%.

This removes any ambiguity from progress reports.

I value your comments, if you have any thoughts on the above please join in and share with others!

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9 Comments »

  • Shim Marom said:

    Project / Task progress report – can a task be 90% done? | quantmleap – http://shar.es/aKP19 #pmot

    # 28 November 2009 at 9:07 pm
  • Ash said:

    A 100 point scale only makes sense if you are going to use it. The actual percent complete at any time is not so important but it is the trend or progress that can be observed and therefore managed over the time scale. It becomes increasingly important as as the scale and complexity of the tasks being measured increases. To be able to determine at a glance the progress and potential impediments to a successful completion. of a task/project is critical in managing a project. If you are just going to go 0, 50 and 100 you might as well use not started, in progress and completed. But this tells the user nothing that is of any value and forces you to drill into the detail when that may not be necessary.

    # 29 November 2009 at 5:19 am
  • shim marom (author) said:

    Good point Ash, however, as demonstrated over and over again, many tasks get reported as almost complete and then remain at that level for quite some time. To overcome the difficulty you raise the approach should be as follows: Rather than require reported progress by % complete request an estimate of effort to complete. Ask the question: How much more work is required to bring this work package to a completion. The notion of %complete assumes that your initial estimate was %100 correct where, in reality, the task may be shorter or longer than initially anticipated. The ‘effort to complete’ gets around this problem and provide a good measure of where you are and how much more to go.

    Cheers,

    Shim.

    # 29 November 2009 at 6:01 am
  • Torsten J. Koerting said:

    RT 80/20 rule, still lot of time required @shim_marom: Project / Task progress report – can a task be 90% done? http://shar.es/aKP19 #pmot

    # 29 November 2009 at 11:09 am
  • Glen B. Alleman said:

    The Earned Value System Descriptions used by US Defense and Space contractors defines an apportioned milestone measurement approach where predefined percentages complete can be used instead of 0/100.

    It is important that the apportioned milestones be “predefined” before the work is started. But the majority of “activities” inside a Work Package are measured as 0/100.

    Another little known fact for the space and defense business is that all Work packages can only cross one accounting period. This means the WP is limited to 60 calendar days or 45 (or so) work days.

    The key here – no matter how you decide to measure PHYSICAL PERCENT COMPLETE (and it has to be physical) is the answer the question “how long are you willing to wait to find out you’re late?” Then set the measurement points accordingly.

    On large NASA programs the answer to that is One (1) Week! We do weekly earned value every Thursday with the Control Account Managers. Then a mid-month “flash report” is sent to NASA and the standard month end 533M report. So twice a month a formal assessment of ETC and EAC is done around a weekly assessment of physical progress.

    This seem;s like a lot of work and it is. But the launch date is booked for mid November 2014 and there are billions of $’s of sunk cost that must be recovered with the successful launch.

    For IT projects, I’ve seen behaviors that would cause contract cancellation in NASA.

    # 2 December 2009 at 2:32 pm
  • Dina said:

    All good points! It pained me in a past job to have to show a ‘percentage complete’ number that wasn’t zero or 100. I felt like I was just playing around with some numbers to produce something that was completely meaningless. I agree that it’s better to just report an estimate of how many hours to complete.

    # 2 December 2009 at 3:02 pm
  • Glen B. Alleman said:

    Dina,
    This is why in the Space and Defense businesses and other US Government and large construction domains the role of “program controls” separates the “doing” of the work from the “reporting” of the progress of the work. The Program Planning and Controls staff also maintains the integrity of the Performance Measurement Baseline (PMB), which is a time phased description of the cost, schedule and technical performance.

    Here’s some introductory background
    http://herdingcats.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/12/why-the-performance-measurement-baseline-is-the-basis-of-project-success.html

    # 2 December 2009 at 3:11 pm
  • Shim Marom said:

    See comments: Project / Task progress report – can a task be 90% done? | quantmleap – http://shar.es/aEBBH #pmot

    # 2 December 2009 at 8:25 pm
  • Project / Task progress report – can a task be 90% done? | quantmleap Report Me said:

    [...] more from the original source: Project / Task progress report – can a task be 90% done? | quantmleap By admin | category: project report | tags: brown, craig-brown, first-half, [...]

    # 7 April 2010 at 12:46 pm

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