Estimated vs Actual Time

How does everyone accurately document their Estimated Time vs Actual Time Spent on tasks for a project?

Currently, in our planning process we assign a Start Date and an End Date for each task (with allocation %, duration, and predecessors for each task) once the person assigned to the task acknowledges and begins working, they update their % complete until task is complete. We know when the task is 100% complete but when we look back at the project we cant see if they actually finished the task in 1 day when we estimated 2, etc.

How do you all keep up with this without the person assigned to a task manually changing start date, end date, allocation %, duration?

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Comments

Brent Nathan

Add 3-4 additional columns:

Baseline Start Date, Baseline End Date, Baseline Variances (make 2 columns if you need to check variances to both start and end dates)

How to use this:

Fill out all your start/end dates with what you are projecting. Copy these dates over to your baseline date columns. When you actually work on the project, adjust the start/end dates as needed. The Baseline variance formula should subtract the difference between a baseline start date, and the actual start date. So you can essentially see if you start date is +/- 3 days from when you projected.

Clear as mud?

Robert Poddar

Hi Brent,

That's a nice idea that you have suggested. The only downside that i see, is that, if the resource takes an unplanned PTO (currently,one cannot mark non-working day for an individual resource), the only option is to increase the duration and put a note that he/she is on PTO. This would cause an "improper" data when calculating the actual effort as you suggested. How do you handle this in your plan?

Robert

Brent Nathan

Break the task down into child tasks.

Start/End Dates- part 1
Gap in dates for leave of absence
Task 2 date range.