Tracking & Estimation

Tracking & Estimation Explained

The tracking & estimation section of the details pane is where entering progress and estimate updates happen.

Estimates

To enter or update an estimate simply enter your best-case and worst-case estimates for how many days it will take you to complete the task. The low and high values should represent a span of time in which you’re about 80% confident your task is going to complete. If you think any value of the range will take less than a day you can use decimals, down to .01, which is equivalent to about five minutes. Currently there is no way to track days in hours, only fractions of a day (in decimal format). If it’s something users indicate they want, we’ll likely release hourly estimates later.

Estimates should always be of remaining days of effort, not total work. The basic idea is that you ask yourself, “As of right now, today, how much work is there remaining on this item?” You do that for best-case and worst-case and then enter it into the remaining work fields.

There are a couple places these values can be entered. In the work detail pane:

And from your dashboard:

Progress

If you are creating a new task and have already been working on it for some time, enter that amount in the progress field. Remember that the units are days, so an hour is about 0.1.

If you are updating an item that was created previously you can click either the “accept” button or the “edit” button. Click the “accept” button if all of the values are correct. Click the “edit” button to correct one or all of the values, then click “save.”

When updating progress only enter the amount of work you’ve done since your last update. Do not enter the total done, we will calculate that for you.

If the task is complete, click the “done” checkbox and then update the progress field to reflect the amount of time it took to complete.

Tracking

After entering an estimate and assigning a workitem to a person automatic tracking may assume progress on an item.

Automatic tracking works by finding each person’s highest priority item and assuming progress is being made on that item. If you see that the automatic tracking is wrong, simply click “edit” and update the fields to reflect how much progress has been made and your current estimate of the remaining work.

heck yeah I want support for hrs…. not having this feature is a major dissapointment for me.

We are in the design phase of estimation in hours (vs. days); it’s currently included in an upcoming time-tracking update.

I quite like the fact that I can estimate in days, because it feels less nitpicky to me. Will this still be an option?

@Qrystal: Yes, you will still have the option to estimate in days. The key difference will be that you’ll have a choice of how you want to make your estimate – hours or days.

Will I be able to enter hours and see days or vice versa? Ideally I can set my workspace view up to show one format but still enter times in the other format. Even within the estimation tab. For example perhaps I could type (6 hrs)(3 days). If I just type (2)(3) then my workspace default would be used. One might even consider allowing each project to have it’s own default.

@stevew: That’s a great idea. We’ll definitely consider all the options of viewing and entering data in both formats.

I came across this thread while searching for a way to enter hours so I’m very glad to see it’s in the works.. When I estimate the amount of effort in tasks I always think in hours and it’s a real pain to have conform to the days method when it’s a simple calculation that could be taken care of behind the scenes. Time is time and you should be able to enter it in hours or days and then view it in any representation of time you wish.

Just a quick comment on the first post on the explanation of estimates:

.01 days is not equivalent to 5 minutes.. it’s closer to 15 minutes…

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=0.01+days+...

Google can be helpful if you need to turn hours into a decimal days representation until entering hours becomes a feature. For example you can go to google and enter: 4.5 hours in days

It will spit back the answer which is 0.1875 days

I have this pasted on my desk and around the office share:

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/88746/LP-day-hours.jpg

@Ricardo Signes – thanks for the handy chart, Ricardo! You might have noticed I posted it to the dashboard so more people would see it. Great idea.

Cool! I hope people find it useful.

Of course, I think the need for this is a mark of something lacking. I look forward to just being able to type “3hr” or however it ends up working. Still, if that’s the worst thing I have to deal with, with my project planner… that ain’t bad at all.

Ha – agreed! I’m happy to tell you, though, that we’re working on this feature now – the ability to enter estimates in days or hours. Look for it in the next release late this year or early next!