Stop Tracking Time by Phases: Why Your Project Management System is Lying to You
Here's a truth that might sting a little: tracking time by phases is for clients, not for internal project management. If you're running your projects based on how you present fees to clients, you're essentially flying blind until it's too late to course correct. But more importantly, you're leaving your team in the dark about what's actually expected of them.
The Hidden Cost of Phase-Based Tracking
Every project manager in the AEC industry knows the feeling. You're three weeks into what should be a six-week design phase when you check the numbers and discover you've already burned through 80% of the phase budget. The immediate questions flood in: Where did the time go? What took longer than expected? Which tasks are eating up the hours? But when you dig into the timesheets, all you find is a sea of hours logged against "Detailed Design" or "Construction Documentation" with maybe some scattered notes that read like "CAD work" or "drawing review."
But here's what we don't talk about enough: the engineer who spent 45 hours on that stormwater management plan had no idea they were only supposed to spend 25. They worked diligently, adding detail, refining calculations, perfecting the design, because nobody told them where the boundaries were. When you lump everything into a phase budget, you're essentially asking your team to work without a map.
By the time you realize a project is hemorrhaging money, it's often too late to implement meaningful corrections. But the real tragedy is that your team probably sensed something was off weeks earlier. They just didn't have the vocabulary or framework to articulate it.
The problem becomes even more pronounced with remote work. Those natural check-ins that used to happen when someone walked past your desk have evaporated. Your CAD technician can't turn to their neighbor and ask, "Hey, I'm 30 hours into this grading plan. Is that normal?" Instead, they keep working, assuming that if there was a problem, someone would tell them.
Why Your Team Deserves Better Than Phase Budgets
Think about it from your team's perspective. When you assign someone to work on "detailed design," what are you really telling them? You're essentially saying, "Go forth and design, and we'll let you know if there's a problem." That's not guidance. That's abandonment.
Here's a hypothetical but all-too-familiar scenario that shows the difference between phase tracking and task tracking from the perspective of the person doing the work:
What Your Team Sees with Phase Tracking:
- Assignment: "Work on detailed design for Project X"
- Budget visibility: None (or maybe "the phase has 400 hours total")
- Success criteria: ¯_(ツ)_/¯
What Your Team Could See with Task-Based Tracking:
- Assignment: "Complete stormwater management plan"
- Budget visibility: "50 hours allocated"
- Current status: "22 hours used, 30% complete per your assessment"
- Clear signal: "We need to talk about scope"
Let me show you how this plays out with real numbers. Imagine checking in on a project early in the detailed design phase:
The Phase View (The Traditional Way):
- Detailed Design Phase: 80 hours used of 400 budgeted (20% consumed)
- Status: "On track - plenty of budget remaining"
The Task View (What Your Team Could See):
- CAD base setup: 12 hours used of 10 budgeted – Complete
- CAD tech learns: "Okay, base setup typically takes me 20% longer than estimated. I should flag this earlier next time."
- Storm sewer plans: 18 hours used of 25 budgeted – 60% complete per engineer
- Engineer realizes: "I'm going to need 30 hours total. Let me talk to the PM about whether I'm adding too much detail."
- Stormwater management: 22 hours used of 50 budgeted – 30% complete per engineer
- Engineer sees the red flag: "At this rate, I'll need 73 hours. Either my approach is wrong, or we underestimated the complexity. Time for a conversation."
See the difference? Task-based tracking isn't about micromanaging. It's about giving your team the information they need to calibrate their effort. It transforms vague anxiety ("This feels like it's taking too long...") into productive conversations ("I'm trending 40% over budget on this task. Can we discuss the level of detail you're expecting?").
The Conversations We're Not Having
Without task-level budgets and visibility, critical alignment conversations simply don't happen. Here's what your team is probably thinking but not saying:
CAD Technician: "I have no idea if spending two days on this base plan setup is normal or excessive. I'll just keep working until someone tells me to stop."
Junior Engineer: "The senior engineer's redlines suggest I need to add way more detail, but wasn't this supposed to be a quick task? I don't want to look incompetent by asking."
Senior Engineer: "I'm spending a lot of time reviewing and fixing junior staff work, but this time just disappears into the phase budget. No wonder we can't accurately estimate review time."
Project Coordinator: "The client keeps asking for 'minor tweaks' that take hours. But since we don't track revisions separately, I can't quantify the impact."
These unspoken concerns create a cascade of problems. The junior engineer over-details their work because they don't know the expected level of effort. The senior engineer can't justify additional review time in future proposals because that time is invisible. The project coordinator can't push back on scope creep because they lack concrete data. Everyone suffers in silence, and projects hemorrhage money while team morale slowly erodes.
Empowering Your Team Through Transparency
The solution isn't complicated, but it requires a fundamental shift in how we think about project budgets. Instead of hoarding budget information at the management level, we need to share it with the people doing the work.
Modern project management systems can support this transparency. Whether you're using Deltek Vision in a large firm, Streamtime in a smaller studio, or Fresh Projects (which I'm currently implementing for one of Archipelago's member firms), the key is setting them up to give your team visibility into their individual task budgets.
When you assign someone a task with a specific hour budget, you're not constraining them. You're communicating expectations. You're saying, "Based on our estimate, this should take about 25 hours. If you're finding it needs significantly more, let's talk about why." This transforms budget tracking from a punishment tool into a communication framework.
Consider this reframe: every task without a visible budget is a recipe for misalignment. The junior engineer might spend 40 hours perfecting something that only warranted 20 hours of effort. The senior CAD tech might rush through a complex drawing in 15 hours when 30 hours were actually budgeted. Both scenarios lead to problems. Overruns in the first case, quality issues in the second.
Creating a Culture of Productive Conversations
Task-based tracking with team visibility creates natural checkpoints for alignment conversations. When someone sees they've used 60% of their budgeted hours but they're only 30% complete, they know it's time to raise their hand. This isn't admitting failure. It's professional project communication.
These conversations might sound like:
Engineer to PM: "I'm 15 hours into the stormwater management plan with about 30% complete. At this rate, I'll need 50 hours total instead of the 30 budgeted. The new low-impact development requirements are more complex than we anticipated. Should I simplify my approach, or do we need to adjust the budget?"
CAD Tech to Team Lead: "I noticed I consistently need about 20% more time than budgeted for base plan setups. Could we review my process? Maybe I'm including unnecessary detail, or maybe our estimates need adjusting."
PM to Client: "Our tracking shows that responding to the second round of municipal comments required 38 hours of additional work, primarily due to the new interpretation of the stormwater bylaws. Here's the specific breakdown..."
Notice how these conversations are specific, professional, and focused on alignment rather than blame? That's what happens when people have clear expectations and real-time visibility into their performance against those expectations.
What Success Really Looks Like
Success isn't just about projects coming in on budget. It's about teams that understand what's expected of them and feel empowered to speak up when reality doesn't match the plan.
Imagine a workplace where your junior engineers know exactly how much time they should spend on each drawing, eliminating the anxiety of working in the dark. Your CAD team can see when they're trending over budget early enough to have productive conversations about scope and approach. Your senior staff can point to specific data when explaining why certain tasks consistently take longer than estimated. Your project managers can have informed conversations with clients about scope creep, backed by detailed tracking of where time actually goes.
When teams have visibility into task-level budgets, patterns emerge naturally. Maybe you discover that stormwater management plans consistently take longer than budgeted because the PM didn't understand the complexity involved. Or perhaps the engineer is going into more detail than required at that stage. Maybe there's an opportunity to improve the drafting time for that type of drawing. The point is, unless you measure the time at the task level and compare it to what's budgeted, the door to having these conversations never even opens.
Making the Change Without Creating Chaos
The shift to task-based tracking doesn't mean overwhelming your team with administrative burden. Start with a pilot project where you create task codes for major deliverables and give your team visibility into their budgeted hours. The goal is to provide clarity, not create anxiety.
The crucial element is framing this as empowerment, not surveillance. You're not tracking tasks to catch people doing something wrong. You're providing visibility so they can calibrate their effort appropriately and ask for help when needed.
Most importantly, you need to respond constructively when people flag that they're trending over budget. If someone raises their hand to say a task is taking longer than expected, that's not a failure. That's the system working. The failure is when people work in silence, burning through budgets without anyone knowing why.
The Bottom Line
Your current phase-based tracking system isn't just giving you poor project visibility. It's leaving your team to work in the dark, guessing at expectations and hoping they're getting it right. Task-based tracking with budget transparency isn't about control. It's about clarity, communication, and giving your team the information they need to succeed.
When people know what's expected of them and can see how they're tracking against those expectations, everyone wins: projects stay on budget, clients get better value, and your team experiences less stress and more professional growth.
In an industry where we pride ourselves on precision in design, isn't it time we brought that same precision to how we manage and communicate about the work itself?
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