Are We There Yet?

With summer vacation upon us, there will always be road trips.  And whenever children are dragged along on road trips, that four-word question will always strike fear into the hearts of grown-ups everywhere.

Are we there yet?

There was a point in my life where I was actually really good at estimating the time left on a trip... almost to the minute.  When my wife would inquire about this amazing skill, I'd simply smile and respond, "Rate x Time = Distance."  Then we added two kids to the mix.  So much for estimating skills.  The whole rate/time/distance formula gets thrown out the window for requisite bathroom breaks, Happy Meal stops, points of interest, photo opportunities, etc., etc.

That's kind of how it works with our project tasks, isn't it?  We're really darn good at estimating as long as we know all of the variables.  And estimating how much is left on a task should be easier still, shouldn't it?  After all, we've started the task, and so we should be able to figure out what is left.

There's a little variable called "Estimate To Complete" (ETC, for short) which can become your best friend (or worst enemy) in answering the "Are we there yet?" inquisition.  In a perfect world, it is simply the budget for the task minus the actual already expended.  Hence, if you said you would spend 100 hours on a task and you've spent 35 hours on it already, your ETC is 65 hours.  Yes, I did say that would work in a perfect world, and you want to know how it works in your imperfect world.

One possible solution is for you to simply re-estimate the time left.  If you've spent 35 hours on your 100 hour task, but you know you have 80 hours of work left, you simply change the ETC from 65 to 80 (which also means you've just given yourself a 15 hour variance).

Another approach is to use an earned value mentality.  Many project managers I know make this concept a lot harder than it needs to be.  In its basic form, you compare the hours expended with how much work actually got done (I know, I know... brilliant, isn't it?).  So... staying with our previous example, let's assume that the 35 hours of work you've expended only completed 20 hours of actual "stuff" that had been budgeted to get done.  That means that you're now taking 75% more effort to get the work done so the originally budgeted 100 hours will also increase by 75%, or become 175 hours.  Since you've used up 35 of those hours, your ETC becomes 140 hours left.

OK, I can see your eyes starting to glaze over.  Enough technical talk.  I think we all agree that this is important.  You have stakeholders and customers and suppliers and employees along with you on your "business" trip who all want to know, "Are we there yet?"  With some simple calculation tools, you can now answer that question.

Carpe Factum!