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.