3 Key Ideas to Managing Duration versus Effort in Your Project

The purpose of this blog post is to cover how to use 3 simple key ideas to managing the difference between Duration and Effort.  

Estimating tasks for the Schedule is under the PLAN domain and in the Timing segment in the Project Management MPM model.

Estimating tasks for the Schedule is under the PLAN domain and in the Timing segment in the MPM model

Duration does not equal Effort

Deliverables and tasks are linked and organized based on dependency and effort in the PLAN part of the MPM model within the project item of Approach (under Map).

Calendar dates are applied, and the detail of duration is added to tasks in the PLAN part of the MPM model within the project items of Schedule (under Timing).

You start with the approach and the deliverable efforts and the apply the schedule and determine the duration.

Duration is how long it actually takes

The Duration is how long something actually takes to complete with all of the interruptions and other tasks that team members are responsible for.

Effort is how much work a task is, if the time is uninterrupted, and done all at once.

Duration is adding a schedule to the effort

Duration can easily be twice the Effort

Effort is how much work it is going to take to do something.  For example: 

• The effort for the deliverable of a document could be:
  • 5 hours for the initial research and outline, 
  • 20 hours for the draft and to collect feedback, 
  • 5 hours to incorporate the feedback, and 
  • 5 hours for the final version and send out, 
  • for a total effort of 35 hours.
• In planning the approach, assuming a work week of somewhere just under 40 hours, that fits nicely into one week of work for one person.

However, the duration, which is how long something actually takes, looks different.

• The duration for the document above is as follows:
  • 5 hours effort for initial research, is actually 4 days duration, because of waiting for the return emails from research institutes with the technical papers
  • 20 hours effort for the draft, is actually 6 days duration, because it takes almost three days to do the draft and email it out, and you have to allow 3 days for people to fit it into their schedule to read, add their comments and send it back
  • 5 hours effort, is actually 1 day duration, because of time required for other responsibilities 
  • 5 hours to produce the final version is also actually 1 day of duration because unrelated meetings to attend and providing feedback to others on their documents
  • for a total duration of 12 days
• In planning the schedule, this activity takes 12 days of duration, so two weeks and 2 days in the schedule

In summary of the example, the effort of about 5 days, actually took 12 days duration to complete, and 2½ times as long.

Application and estimating

There isn’t some magical multiplier for how long the duration is versus the effort, to use when doing planning.  

However, as can be seen in the example above, being realistic with respect to an average workday, and all of the various activities people juggle, it is not unreasonable to assume that it takes at least twice as long for the duration versus the effort and often much more.

Duration can easily take 2 to 3 times longer than effort

What you might find helpful is when planning your schedule, take the effort that someone has provided for how long they estimate a deliverable to take and first multiply by a factor of between 2 and 3.  Another blog post discusses how to help team members do estimating.

Then to this add in any additional obvious interruptions that is out of the control of the person doing the deliverable.  

During the project team meeting when you are laying out the schedule, ask if there are any major interruptions expected during the timeframe.  If someone has several days off planned, or a four-day course scheduled, then you need to add that into the deliverable duration if the deliverable falls within the window of those interruptions.

You can see how the durations can change week to week, depending on when the work is being done, and this is why as part of the habits for PLAN on a weekly basis, one of the key activities is to review over the schedule with the team during the weekly project team meeting.

It is important to review over the schedule with the team, because they often have better insights into their own effort versus duration for the tasks they are expected to complete.

Summary

The effort for tasks is determined and documented in the Approach project item of the MPM model, under PLAN.  

However, it is in the Schedule project piece of the Project Management MPM model, also within Step 2 and 3, where the imposition of all of the other responsibilities that people juggle comes into the calculation of duration, which can add two to three times and more onto the effort estimated to complete a task.

Start with the effort provided by the team member to complete a task, and then when add the task to the schedule, and together with the team member, understand a realistic duration for the delivery of the task.

This iterative approach between effort and duration is an on-going challenge for the manager managing a project, and it is most efficient to do this during a team meeting each week as the schedule is being adjusted, and deliverable and task completion is being reviewed.

Action Steps / Apply This Knowledge

1. In the schedule, either on a spreadsheet, or using a project management tool, over three columns, the first is for the deliverable or task, the second for the effort, and the third for the duration.
2. During the weekly project team meeting, distinguish between effort and duration, but first ask how much effort is remaining and compare that with the estimate from the team member.
3. Then using that calculation, together with the team member, determine the duration for each task by imposing the task on a calendar schedule which requires that you take into account any interruptions in the team member’s schedule and any competing priorities they are juggling.
4. Prompt engineering guidance for AI GPTs such as chatGPT: “I’m a business leader launching a project whose plan encompasses deliverables X, Y, and Z. What do I need to keep in mind when identifying the effort versus duration for the tasks that go towards completing those deliverables?”

Learn More to Do More

Business evolves through change initiatives otherwise known as projects. The key to managing these change initiatives so you have more time, and less stress is to use simple strategies and tools.

Check out the Learning Hub’s other Articles with Actionable Steps, organized with a busy leader in mind, by topic or main idea, and with some AI GPT (e.g. ChatGPT) prompt engineering suggestions under the Action steps: https://simplepmstrategies.com/learning-hub-index

PLAN – Schedule Duration vs Effort 

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