As project managers we often live and die by the percent complete of the tasks on our project schedules. We obsess over them and compare the tasks to the calendar dates. Are we as far along as we should be? Is my assigned resource making progress? And what, exactly, does 43% complete really mean? What does it look like? If you’re me it looks about like the progress in my new house that my contractor has made up to this point when he was supposed to be done a little over a month ago. Ugh! But I digress…
You can understand my frustration – and skepticism – with the reporting of percent complete from project staff. How many times have you relied on your project team to supply you with weekly (perhaps even daily?) percent complete updates on some of their key tasks and curiously the progress reported sometimes rises by 1% over the previous week’s report. 1%. What is that? And we often don’t question it because it is at least showing progress, there isn’t anything going on that is a showstopper for the project and we’re too busy to dig deeper into that 1% progress report...
You can understand my frustration – and skepticism – with the reporting of percent complete from project staff. How many times have you relied on your project team to supply you with weekly (perhaps even daily?) percent complete updates on some of their key tasks and curiously the progress reported sometimes rises by 1% over the previous week’s report. 1%. What is that? And we often don’t question it because it is at least showing progress, there isn’t anything going on that is a showstopper for the project and we’re too busy to dig deeper into that 1% progress report...
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