Task Progress as Percent Complete

For many tasks, I’d prefer to record the task as a percent complete, rather than time spent on it.

Actually, it would be nice to record time spent AND percent complete. Then, get a report of time spent vs. % complete. This would help track how accurate our estimates are.

We actually approach this from a slightly different angle. When you record the work you have done, we suggest you re-estimate the remainder. As you do more work, you will have a better idea of how much work is remaining.

When you want to see how well you have been estimating, take a look at the analysis tab. The total work chart will show you your estimates versus your actual work. If you have been estimating well, then the black line (expected work) should be roughly horizontal, if you over estimated initially, it will slope down, underestimating initially will mean the line should slope up.

With that being said, we’re also going to be looking into ways to make tracking your time spent easier in one of our next sprints, so I’ll keep using percent complete in mind ;)

More Information:
Total Work

Along the same lines of estimating and re-estimating your work, you might want to take a look at an article Liz just posted:
Estimates vs Targets

@ThreeDPeruna – Also note that once you accept that there is uncertainty in estimates, then percent complete starts to become less meaningful. Suppose you had a task with 5 days of actual work done and 5-10 days of estimated work remaining. The percent complete value would need to be expressed as a range as well, since the task is somewhere between 33% and 50% done (the expected percent complete is 40%.)

If you stare at this from a probability perspective, percent complete is not that useful as a single number (if we add it to LP, we’d add all three percentage numbers).

One thing we don’t advise is taking percent complete estimates from people because people are just notoriously bad at estimating this way. Time and time again you see people quickly jump up to 80% done and then stay there week after week as the work expands and the schedule slips. It is much better to re-estimate as a range and discuss the reasons why the end points of the range fall where they do.

The bottom line is that we feel “single-point estimates and percent complete tracking” does not work and that “range-estimates and capturing and managing away uncertainty” is the new way.

Based on what you’re saying is that at the end of the day, the task that is incomplete gets a revised estimate of what will take to complete it. Then, everything else will get adjusted. This then gets tracked on the Analysis tab (it appears to be so)?

Yes. Note the Analysis tab has several reports – they are a bit hard to discover at the moment (see the button on the far right of the tool bar.)