Re: Planner-list Poll: how do you track progress?

[Kurt Maute <Kurt Maute us>]

On Fri, 2007-10-19 at 23:49 +0200, Maurice van der Pot wrote:
> I'll apologize in advance in case I'm asking too many questions ;-)
> 
> On Wed, Oct 17, 2007 at 09:56:35PM +0100, Nigel Wilkinson wrote:
> > Also in sometimes unthought of tasks race their ugly head and have to
> > be added in. In this case it won't have a baseline so we need to
> > baseline this one task without altering the existing baseline for the
> > other tasks.
> 
> So when you add a new task to the baseline, it should not change any
> other tasks in the baseline? In other words, after adding and baselining
> new tasks, the baseline does not have to be a valid schedule anymore?

If you make any changes to a baselined schedule (other than tracking
progress against it), you'd need to re-baseline it.  So after adding a
new task, you'd have a new schedule, etc.  Process wise, PM's generally
need an agreement with their customer in order to do this.

> Would you expect the software to provide a "revert to baseline" feature
> or is undo/load good enough? If the baseline is not necessarily a valid
> schedule, reverting to the baseline may be tricky.

Yes, I think there should be a revert to baseline function.  There was a
good description in bugzilla around a way to do baselines.  Bugzilla
seems to be having some problems right now, but I think this one was it:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=140676

> And what should happen to the baseline data for a task if the task is
> removed in the current plan? What if it's split up into multiple tasks?
> Should there be a way to reassociate a baseline task with a task in the
> current plan? Does a baseline still work after drastically
> rearranging/reordering tasks in the current plan?

As above, you'd need to rebaseline.

> I'm also still wondering on how to integrate the "tracking progress in
> time" feature. The many articles I read on the net seem to track
> progress of a task in one of two ways:
> 1) an estimated percentage of completion
> 2) a more objective measure (EVM-like) such as: 
>   a) task started = 30% of its value, task completed = 100% of its value
>   b) fixed percentages for completion of design, implementation, 
>      documentation and testing of a task
> 
> I find it strange that nr 1 is done in percentages and not in two steps:
> 1) recording the effort spent and 2) estimating the work still to be
> done. If I am asked for a percentage and a duration, I first check the
> time I spent, then do an effort estimate for the remaining work and then
> calculate duration & percentage from that. Never the other way around.
> I'm still trying to understand why I seem to be alone in this.

I think many people track progress with simple percentages because its
quick, easy, and its sufficient for many projects.  

EVM is a good, well accepted method of tracking progress, which would be
great to implement in Planner.  Wikipedia has a good article on it if
you haven't seen it yet:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earned_value_management


-- 
Kurt Maute <Kurt Maute us>