Effort vs. Duration vs. Elapsed Time: Project Management Series

What is Effort?

In project management, the effort is the amount of time it takes to complete a task. The action is usually expressed in hours, days, or weeks.

Effort can be used as a metric to measure progress on a project.

For example, if you have a project with ten tasks, each task is estimated to take 30 days. Therefore, you can use the total effort of all functions to indicate how much progress has been made on your project.

Suppose you were working on two projects simultaneously, having ten tasks each with an estimated 30 days per task. In that case, you'd have combined 20 and 60 days of total effort for both projects. If both projects run at the same speed and finish all tasks within 60 days, then you can use the actual attempt to indicate that both are running at the same rate.

What is Duration?

Duration is the length of time for which a project will be in progress. It can be stated in terms of days, weeks, months, or years. The scope, resource availability, client's requirements, and constraints determine the project's duration.

Duration is one of the essential concepts in Project Management because it determines how long the project will take to complete.

Suppose you cannot decide on the time of your project correctly. In that case, there are chances that you may end up overrunning your schedule or underrunning your plan, thus leading to the failure of the project.

Duration is "the amount of time required to complete an activity or process."

What is Elapsed Time?

A project's elapsed time is the amount of time that has passed since the project began. Elapsed time is recorded in days, weeks, months, and even years.

Project managers use elapsed time to indicate how much time has been spent on a particular task or phase.

For example, if a team member has been working on a task for two weeks, then the elapsed time for that task will be two weeks.

It's important to note that elapsed time does not consider any delays or obstacles that may have occurred during a project's life cycle.

 In other words, if an obstacle has affected your team member's progress at work, their actual work hours may be greater than what you see in the report.

The Effort, Duration, and Elapsed Time in Project Management Series

The effort, duration, and elapsed time constitute a small part of the project-scheduling module. You may not need to know these concepts for your exam, but it's good to understand them anyway.

As a project manager, you'll want to be well-trained in project schedules to efficiently manage deadlines and other time constraints. If you're not skilled at this, your projects could start costing more than they should due to delays and other problems.

Conclusion

We hope you enjoyed reading this article on our effort vs. duration vs. elapsed time: project management series. We hope that it cleared up any confusion you may have had about the differences between these values, how they can help you in project management, and how they are implemented into software systems that automatically track the progress of projects.

In the Project Management community, there has been a long debate about which metric is best for tracking the progress of a project and for managing people's expectations.

Usually, the conversation centers on Effort vs. Duration vs. Elapsed Time. However, the critical thing to remember when measuring project progress is that it is not necessary to choose just one metric.