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Tracking Your Project Progress: Record actuals and Estimates
September 19, 2008 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Project Management Best Practices
Tracking Your Project Progress: Record actuals and Estimates (#19 in the series 21 Project Management Success Tips)
By Karl E. Wiegers
Someone once asked me where to get historical data to improve her ability to estimate future work. My answer was, “If you write down what actually happened today, that becomes historical data tomorrow.” Unless you record the actual effort or time spent on each task and compare them to your estimates, you’ll never improve your estimating approach. Your estimates will forever remain guesses. Each individual can begin recording estimates and actuals, and the project manager should track these important data items on a project task or milestone basis. In addition to effort and schedule, you could estimate and track the size of the product, in units of lines of code, function points, classes and methods, GUI screens, or other units that make sense for your project.
Adapted from “Practical Project Initiation: A Handbook with Tools” (Microsoft Press, 2007). A condensed version of this paper was published in Software Development magazine.
Karl Wiegers, Ph.D., is Principal Consultant with Process Impact, a software process consulting and education company in Portland, Oregon. Karl’s most recent book is “Practical Project Initiation: A Handbook with Tools.” Karl is also the author of four other books and 170 articles. Karl is a frequent speaker at software conferences and professional society meetings. You can reach Karl through www.projectinitiation.com or www.processimpact.com.
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