How is ETC used in daily life?

To give the project manager an overview of the exact remaining work, and thereby provide the best requisite for setting a realistic deadline for the project, the employees need to enter their personal ETC estimations for allocated tasks. An employee may e.g. estimate that (s)he needs 20 hours to complete a task, even though s(he) has used 40 of the 50 budgeted hours. Hereby, the project manager sees that an employee expects to use additional 10 hours to finish the tasks; 60 hours in total. To give the project manager an understanding of why the additional hours are needed, the employee may enter a comment to the ETC estimate, and state the level of uncertainty; high, medium or low. In this example the employee may e.g. enter that there is high certainty that (s)he needs 20 hours before the task is completed.

The employee’s estimate is included in the project manager’s project progress, and (s)he sees the estimations of all employees held up against the original budget. At the same time, the project manager sees how many hours have been tracked on each task. If you add the total time spent to the entered ETC on each task, you get the EAC - –the total end estimate called Estimate At Completion, which is the time you expect to have used at the end of the project.