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.