Project Estimating

Project Estimating

Estimating project costs in hours or money is not easy.

The course describes techniques for top down and bottom up estimating and shows how estimates which are uncertain at the start of a project can and should be refined at later project stages.

Only one of the 14 sessions of the course is entitled Estimating. However, other sessions cover things an estimator will also need to know. A good estimator will need to understand:

• how to define projects properly (badly defined projects are very difficult to estimate!)
• the project lifecycle (historical costs can be a useful tool but only if the lifecycle is consistently applied)
• how to factor in contingency for risks
• how to construct a schedule
• tracking and time recording so that these activities can be properly included in estimates
• quality management tasks so that they can be properly estimated for
• change control so that time for change and the administration of change are included in estimates
• project management "overheads" - e.g. team meetings can take a lot of time

In fact a good estimator will need to understand just about everything that the project management course covers to be able to do their job well.

Top Down

Estimating tools are a seductive idea. You buy an estimating tool that asks you hundreds, even thousands, of questions about your project and the tool tells you what your project will cost. The trouble is that these tools tend to ask you two sorts of questions: the unanswerable and the un-understandable.

At the start of a large project if the tool asks 'how many web pages will be produced of medium complexity?' that question is probably unanswerable. And if the tool asks 'will six sigma quality be a mandatory requirement in non-critical month end processing?' you wouldn't know what the question meant and certainly wouldn't realise that the difference between a yes and a no answer could mean a doubling of testing costs. By the time you've guessed at the answers to a couple of hundred questions like that you can see how accurate the tool's estimate will be.

This project management course describes practical techniques for estimating project cost and duration: Project Management Course in UK

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