Measuring Project Progress

The post is made possible by the great people at Seavus, creators of online Project Management tools such as ProjectOffice.net, Project Viewer, and Project Planner.  Please visit their site for more information.

A section of Eric Verzuh’s book “The Portable MBA in Project Management” provides the basis for much of this article.

Measuring Progress

The key to finishing a project on time and on budget is to start out that way and stay on track throughout the project. When project managers start with challenging schedules and then fall behind, even by a little, they spend the rest of the project trying to catch up. Other projects, however, seem to have a self-correcting process built into them; if they fall behind a little, the problem is quickly identified and dealt with immediately. Progress measurements are the tools we use to identify problems when they are small and there is still time to catch up. Because cost and schedule progress comprise two-thirds of the cost-schedule-quality equilibrium, they are the primary focus of progress measurement.

During each reporting period, the project team records actual start and completion dates for each task in the WBS, along with the actual cost incurred by each. This data is then compared to the cost and schedule baseline to evaluate project team performance against the plan.

The primary tool for illustrating a schedule is also good for displaying schedule status. Of course I’m referring to the Gantt chart – something no project manager leaves home without. A summary-only Gantt chart can be a useful tool for reporting schedule progress to high-level management or customers who are not interested in all the details. The focus in a summary Gantt chart is on displaying schedule status. To get actual task completion status, the project manager must communicate with those working on the task.

The truth about cost and schedule status is often elusive because it is hard to pin down what portion of a task or project is really complete. Many a project has fallen into the trap of subjective assessment of progress. Subjective assessments—a gut feeling from the project manager or team members—tend to be overly optimistic early in the project. Even as the project passes the halfway point in the schedule, if we rely on intuition or how we “feel” about the project, the assessment often turns out to have little relationship to reality.

Few organizations admit to running their project by the project manager’s “gut feeling,” but their assessment methods are far from objective. Project managers may be asked to give a project a rating of “green, yellow, or red” to indicate their confidence or need for executive involvement. This subjectivity multiplies when considering a portfolio of projects. As manager of 10 or 100 projects, how do you really know the status of each one? If you have a subjective assessment of how your projects are going, how do you compare one project to another for making decisions on your project portfolio?

Summary

Relying on the project manager’s assessment of project status based on feedback from task owners is more subjective than objective, unfortunately. And that is the basis for overall project portfolio status in the case of many top organizations. Diving further by using earned value analysis methods can yield more detailed project status results, but not without additional costs and efforts. The key is to try to use some sense of reality when measuring project status and percent complete on tasks. Being overly optimistic serves no good purpose for your customers or for your organization.

Related posts:

1. Project Communication Series: Project Schedule
2. Maintaining Project Control
3. ProjectOffice.net: Getting Started – Part 2
4. 6 Considerations When Moving to a Web-based Project Management Tool
5. 5 tips for using SharePoint as a PMIS