Tracking Work Hours in Microsoft Project

Training in Microsoft Project 2003 explains how to track resources so that you can estimate project completion dates. This works with tangibles like capital or equipment, but the bane of every Project user is tracking employee work hours.

Getting Work Estimates

As you may remember from your training, Microsoft Project 2003 plans often revolve around schedules. By estimating how long each task will take and lining up the tasks that are dependent on each other, you get an estimated finish date.

Where do you get the estimated task durations? The best place is from the employees. They know the work and, more importantly, they know how fast they can do the work. As tasks are parcelled out, have each person make an educated guess how long each task will take.

Of course, real life often doesn't work like training. Microsoft Project 2003 allows you to adjust the schedule as things run late, but it's better if you can put some leeway into the schedule.

Using the Past to Predict the Future

One way to create more accurate estimates is to look at an employee's history. Very few people get their estimates right. Sometimes -okay, rarely- projects are completed in less time. Often tasks take longer.

That's not a problem because most people are off by the same margin. For example an employee might consistently take 50% longer than estimates. That's not a problem as long as you factor that in. If he estimates 10 hours for a task, put 15 into Project for a more accurate estimate.

Actually people are seldom exactly the same amount off. The employee above might actually run 40%-60% so you would actually enter 10 hours as 14-16. When all of these tasks are strung together, rather than a single carved-in-stone completion date that you are unlikely to hit you get a range of dates that will be a more accurate estimate of the project conclusion.

Counting Irrelevant Tasks

Examples used for training in Microsoft Project 2003 are perfect world simulations where employees don't take breaks, have family emergencies, or spend half their day attending meetings.

When you ask people to report time worked you inevitably get comments like, "I really did this in four hours but with all the email and phone calls I have to deal with it took me eight." So how long did the task take? Eight hours.

Rather than trying to account for every detail from standing at the snack machine to reinstalling Windows when the registry got corrupted, just have people report the total time from start of task to finish. This gives a picture of how long work takes in the real world, distractions included.