A simple rule to start getting in time

If you have a small personal project, or don’t see a good reason to introduce Agile methodology into a particular corporate project, you can use this simple rule to measure the progress. It’s called “50% rule”:

Once you’ve reached 50% of the project’s timeline, check whether 50% of work has been done at this point.

It works perfectly with the deadlines, when you know what date you should have the result to. If there is no deadline but a fixed budget instead, you can evaluate efforts needed for the completion of the project, at least roughly.

This brings another constraint: you need to be able to somehow measure the work. If you cannot measure, the chance of getting in time lands to zero.

Here is an example. Let’s say, your budget is around 1 month of a full time worker,i.e. 21–22 working days. And you need to paint 300 square meters of wall. Once you reach day 10, you need to check whether 150 square meters were already painted or not. If not, you need to speed up your work.

50% of the time mark is always not “too late”. So evaluate, measure, succeed.

It’s the simplest rule to control progress. If you would like to be more precise, meet Agile methodologies in all their glory!

Photo by Jonathan Chng on Unsplash.