The Problem with 'Percent Complete' Project Reporting

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 like 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.  But if we took the time to step back and look at the reporting week to week we would see that one or more team members may just be upping the % in order to show at least some progress on paper.  Is that good?  Not really.  It works for a while, but it can be masking an underlying problem.

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