Don’t Use Percent Complete

Don't yell at me. I'm just quoting Johanna. (But, I do agree with her!)

Johanna has this crazy idea of using inch-pebbles for tracking project performance. It's a play on the word milestone. She claims that percent complete gives a misleading view of a project. The calculation is either based on effort applied versus planned effort, or just a plain SWAG. As Johanna proposes a more useful way is to track the percent of tasks completed versus total tasks planned. You only take credit for finished work. The idea is to break the milestone or phase down into discrete (2-day) tasks that can be monitored.

Most of the time this must be done by milestone or project phase. Still you can't know the total tasks before the project finishes. The usual project is emergent. It unfolds. Additionally, there are ad hoc tasks that can be more critical to the project success than something planned at the beginning of the project or phase. Inch-pebbles alone won't provide confidence.

For over 10 years the members of the Lean Construction Institute have been using a similar measure of project success. It is known by the unfortunate name of project plan percent complete (PPC). It measures the success of completing promised tasks. Performers or workgroup leaders make the promises. Tasks are either completed as promised or they are not. You get 0% or 100% for each task. PPC is a measure of planning reliability. People who use the Last Planner System™ consider the PPC measure to be the key measure of overall planning system performance. Are you doing what you need to be doing and said that you can do? The key is the reliable completion and therefore release of work.

We still have to answer the real question:

Will this project finish as promised?

Since we've grown not to trust the answer to this question, we try to develop our own opinion by watching percent complete. But as Johanna explains, "After you've done 90% of the project, you have the other 90% to do."

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