How Will You Measure Project Progress?

Measuring progress is one of the challenging areas of Project Management and since it is challenging it is often left inadequately addressed. Some project activities are more complex than others to measure and may inherently have a higher degree of subjectivity involved in determining progress. Other activities seem more straight-forward and have more readily measureable progress points. Determining how progress is measured and reported is critical to executing your project successfully. Failures to measure progress adequately increases your project risk as it may lead you to represent the progress inaccurately and failing to spot critical shortcomings before it is too late to invoke correction actions.

Project Management Institute (PMI) provides an overview of the principal methods for determining performance in their Practice Standard for Earned Value Management. The overview provides a great framework for discussing and determining the methodology for your projects. A key point to remember is to agree the measurement methods prior to authorizing the project work. This ensures consistency and reduces the impact of variability due to different people’s subjective interpretations.

The primary methods for measuring progress are based on:

1. Discrete Effort

It the work activity directly produces a measurable end product (output) it is considered Discrete Effort. The key here is that you need to produce observable, measurable progress. Depending on the nature and duration of the work we may choose to base our progress on a Fixed Formula, Weighted Milestone, Percent Complete or Physical Measurement. 

Let’s do a simple example where my project is to paint a fence that runs around a farm.

If the work is expected to complete within two reporting periods I may want to simplify the progress reporting using a Fixed Formula. I may for example decide that I will credit 25% for the start of the work activity and the remaining 75% upon completion of the activity. Other typical Fixed Formula credit methods are 50/50 and 0/100. Although this may not accurately reflect the work performance I am making a trade-off between the cost of capturing more accurate data and the benefit I achieve by having this additional data.

If your activity duration is longer, you may want to use Weighted Milestone. In this case I would define measureable milestones and assign a certain amount of credit for each milestone. So for my fence painting project I may have the following milestones:

• Purchase paint 5% 
• Paint delivered on site 10% 
• Primer coat completed 35% 
• d. Final coat completed 40% 
• e. Inspected 10% 

Progress is only gained as milestones are completed. This ensures objectivity and ease of measurement, but since no partial credit is given for in-progress work it may skew the progress numbers if they are of long duration, or if the milestones and weights weren’t carefully chosen.

If you want to go more granular you can use the Percent Complete credit method, whereby you provide an estimate of the percentage of work completed. The more objective and measureable the data you can base the percent complete estimate on, the better. For example, this could be based on a an estimate of how many fence boards have been completed. However, this is the most subjective of the Discrete Effort measurement methods and requires careful planning of how the estimates of progress will be derived.

The last Discrete Effort method is Physical Measurement. Continuing with my example I could base the measurement of the actual number of completed (primer and final paint) fence boards vs. the total number of fence boards in my work scope. As you can see, this is the most time consuming, but potentially also most accurate, way of measuring your progress.

2. Apportioned Effort
Quality Assurance and Inspection is an example of a work activity that often has a direct relation to discrete work. For example, the effort needed for QA and Inspections could be in direct relation to the delivery of materials and components as they are produced (you normally don’t need to hire inspectors to inspect deliverables unless they are actually completed). In my fence painting project I could therefore say that QA & Inspection is apportioned 10% to the actual painting activity. In other words, if 50% of the painting activity is completed, 50% of the QA & Inspection activity is completed. Note that you should only use the Apportioned Effort method if you have actual historical data to support the relationship.

3. Level of Effort
Certain activities, like Project Management, do not necessarily produce any tangible products and cannot easily be measured objectively in terms of progress. For these kinds of activities you will assign a plan value and for each reporting period you will assign an Earned Value equal to the Planned Value – in other words, you will appear as progressing at exactly the plan, and never have a schedule variance. However, you will often incur a cost variance, both in terms of over-spending or under-spending. Level of Effort activities should be kept to a minimum as they would skew your progress measurement numbers.

Selecting your progress measurement strategy is a key decision that will impact your ability to spot and correct variances. As PMI says “an incorrect choice of a performance measurement method can result in inaccurate status, and subsequently result in incorrect or ineffective management action”.