Call it Z or LET or TimeTool or PZV or Excel or AZN or PvB or whatever you need to – an ugly tool that you have to enter your project times into it… splitted by categories of your work like general Design/Implement/Test/PM or accounted on micro-managed tasks like

• “Analyse part of Error #2323 in App-Module KillThreads”
• “Fix part of Error #2323 in App-Module KillThreads”
• “Test part of Error #2323 in App-Module KillThreads”
• “Patch part of Error #2323 in App-Module KillThreads”
• “Rollout part of Error #2323 in App-Module KillThreads”

• “Document part of Error #2323 in App-Module KillThreads”

... the granularity of your project accounting makes controlling it useful or just a big data warehouse that results in a massive waste of time each project-participant, the project-manager and of course the customer. Of course especially very detail-focussed organisations, often public/official relation corporations explain their unbelievable size of organizational overhead with these details… but who needs it?

Apart from accounting times for tasks (let’s assume the granularity is a well “medium” granularity) – not everyone spends the same time as hour-accouting into progress accounting.

Or is you concept, after 50 hours of the 100 hours estimated initially, really finished by 50% ? do you track the results-progress only, or just the time that you sat around searching for hidden games on Microsoft Word?

it seems many organizations track time to get an idea about progress. what a dumb thing… check this out: Project Time accounting

Anyway – what counts is only the relation hours spent to the work completition … a simple one physical formular that applies to projects aswell as to real world.

But where do we get the work-completion data from? We don’t have a tool for it you ask? That’s your job as a project manager (or team-lead, module-responsible, whatever) ... ask your team-members, talk to the customers, speak to the QA folks and maybe even let your wife play around with the result (application).... and then – measure it with your metrics… Only the responsible project manager can, after a careful evaluation, quantitize progress already normalized… otherwise you will always find task in a mode like 99,9 or 99,99 or even 99,999% finished because a very carefull coder has not yet added all comments according to the projects qa-guidelines… got the point?

And yes – that’s work – your work !