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Comparing estimated time with time spent
Comparing estimated time with time spent

Working with estimates; time on boards and in columns; and timesheets

Dovidas Baranauskas avatar
Written by Dovidas Baranauskas
Updated over a week ago

In many project-methodologies - and in projects in general - it's common to estimate the perceived effort of tasks. This can take the form of a point system, as made popular by Scrum, or by assigning a time value such as hours or days. These estimations can help answer questions like “will we finish on time” or “how much more work can we take on this sprint/week/month”. By combining estimates with timesheets and card time on board, you can compare the guesswork and the actual work done.

Adding estimates and tracking velocity

In Favro, cards can get a certain amount of points, hours, days or any other kind of estimation that suits you. You can show estimation on cards by going to the board menu (⋮) and click Show. Once you have set an estimation in the field on the right side of your card it will be visible on the card, both in the backlog (by enabling the estimation column) and on the board.

By using our burndown chart you can easily see how many cards (or estimated hours/points) on average your team can burn through during one sprint. Based on this historical data you can plan how much work to take on moving forward.

Using time on board, timesheets, and summaries to track the progress of work as you go

As you are working on a project you can continuously compare your estimated effort with the amount of work completed. Also taking into account the amount of time left, you will get a feeling for if you are likely to finish the project on time. 

One of the easiest ways to compare estimation with time spent is by showing time on board. This will automatically display how long a card has been on a board and will therefore help you discover bottlenecks. Time on board will keep ticking away until the card reaches the right-most column. 

If you are using the first column of your board as a backlog/ to do list, the time on board will most likely be inaccurate since it will start ticking before you have actually started working. In the best of worlds, you would use a backlog in this case for work not yet started. Another way of getting around this is to manually add time spent on cards through our timesheets feature.

By enabling summaries for timesheets and estimation on the board, these two will appear in column and board header as well as in lanes if enabled. Once your project or sprint is completed you can compare estimated effort (to the left) with the actual outcome (to the right). 

If you are interested in reading more about overviewing ongoing work and identifying bottlenecks in your process, check out our article about working with cycle time and control chart.

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