Tracking Progress Without Using Hours

[Marc]

When I worked in software development, it was somewhat easy to track true
progress because every task was estimated via hours, then we tracked actual
hours against remaining hours.

However, I have since moved into an Infrastructure area of the business and
the this particular area of the business simply isn't at a point where they
can/will estimate work and track against it via hours.

To that end, is there any other way to track progress? I have some ideas
that mostly take into consideration where we are in the year versus how many
weeks remaining before the deadline, but I haven't been able to actually
implement anything yet.

Any ideas??

 

[John]

When I worked in software development, it was somewhat easy to track true
progress because every task was estimated via hours, then we tracked actual
hours against remaining hours.

However, I have since moved into an Infrastructure area of the business and
the this particular area of the business simply isn't at a point where they
can/will estimate work and track against it via hours.

To that end, is there any other way to track progress? I have some ideas
that mostly take into consideration where we are in the year versus how many
weeks remaining before the deadline, but I haven't been able to actually
implement anything yet.

Any ideas??

Marc,
Have you looked into using classical earned value methodology? Classical
earned value, (that used by Project), tracks performance in terms of
cost for both cost performance, (that one makes sense), and schedule
performance. In my opinion the latter, (SPI tracked in terms of cost),
does not make sense. Nonetheless, classical earned value methods
prevail. You can read more about earned value in the Project help file.

Hope this helps.

John
Project MVP