Measuring Progress
One of the hardest things to do in managing projects is to actually measure progress. When you are following a road map, you monitor the road signs and see whether they agree with your planned route. In well-defined jobs, such as construction projects, it is generally fairly easy to tell where you are. You can measure the height of a brick wall or see whether all the conduit is installed, and so on. That is, you can tell where you are when a part of the work is actually finished. When work is poorly defined, and it is only partially complete, however, you have to estimate where you are.
This is especially true of knowledge work—work done with one’s head, rather than one’s hands. If you are writing software code, designing ...
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