This weeks tweets looked at tracking actuals, revising estimates during the project, and using estimates to complete to measure progress. There are 3 great reasons for tracking actual hours and costs on a project.
#1 is that actuals help track overall progress against the plan
#2 reason to track actuals is that they give you information you can use to make adjustments to the plan during the project.
#3 reason to track actuals is they give you data to plan future projects. The more actuals you have the better future estimates can be.

If you use a project scheduling tool such as MS Project or Workbench make sure to baseline the plan before you start entering actual hours. As you track and record actual work hours against tasks you can start to see trends and get info that can be used to revise the plan. Actual data lets you revise estimates for future tasks.E.G. If the 1st 3 web pages took 10% longer you can update the other page estimates.

Revising estimates is not a bad thing. Having this data can help you make decisions so the final delivery date can still be met. Another metric that can help you manage the plan is estimates to complete or ETCs. ETCs are the hours estimated to complete a started task.

Every week have resources with open tasks give you their ETC. This does 2 things. 1) It lets you determine if the task will be done on time. The second use of ETCs is to give you a heads up that a task needs more time. Getting this data early lets you make proactive adjustments. For example if a task is taking twice as long you can look to see if it is too complex or if you need to get other resources to do other tasks to keep the schedule on track.

This tip is a compilation of tweets that look at how to fine tune project estimates and turn them into a work plan.

After the first draft estimate is done, take a few days to have the team, stakeholders, IT, and business resources review and comment. Once the team and others have provided comments go ahead and make adjustments to the estimates. Make sure all deliverables have estimates.

After making adjustments now look at the estimate versus the budget. You wait till now to avoid building the estimate to fit the budget. If the estimate is within 10% of the budget, high or low, you are probably ok to create the workplan. Double check with mgmt to make sure.

The first step to build the workplan is to group the tasks you estimated into logical groupings, Start at a high level such as coding. The next step is to further group the tasks into functional or like groups. E.G.you can group web screen coding or new policy tasks. The next step is to identify the dependencies between tasks.

Once the dependencies are listed you can identify the critical path. This will be those tasks that are dependent that take the most time. The reason for the critical path is the CP will tell you if the project can meet the expected delivery date or to set a delivery date. If the CP date is ok then you can complete the plan and begin to communicate it to the team and stakeholders.