- Will you be able to effectively monitor its progress?
The principle is quite simple. To make sure that your project
is staying on schedule, you’ll need to be able to gauge that
team members are making progress as expected. The most
convenient way to gauge their progress is by observing the
completion of relatively small elements of work routinely—typi-
cally at your project team meetings. Therefore, elements of
work need to be broken down enough that you can verify their
completion readily.
Failure to Know When to Stop Planning. This can be just as
much a problem as not planning in enough detail. Some people
believe that the further they break down the work, the more
control they’ll achieve. That’s simply not true.
Let’s say that you’re managing a 14-month project and you
conduct team status meetings every two weeks. If you plan in
such detail that your elements of work are only a few days in
duration, several of them may (or may not!) be completed
between team meetings.So, you won’t benefit from the greater
planning unless you check on progress almost daily. If you just
depend on status reports every two weeks, many of your
schedule details probably won’t matter.
In addition, if your work elements are sized too small, creat-
ing the schedule and keeping it up to date could become an
An Overview of Planning and Estimating 103Size Them Right!
There are two rules of thumb regarding how far to break
down the work on a project, to determine what elements of
work you’ll put on your schedule and track. Both of these rules are
reasonable and valid.
One popular rule of thumb suggests that you should size schedule
items at around 40-80 labor hours.
The second rule—and the one I recommend—suggests that you try
to size schedule items proportional to the project—at around 4% of
overall project duration. For example, if a project will take only six
months, schedule items should be about one week in duration. For an
18-month long project, three weeks is probably a reasonable size.
Remember, these are guidelines only.