What does it take to figure out estimating projects with laser-sharp precision? Here’s what experts have to say in terms of productivity and efficiency.
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. Estimating projects is part and parcel of project management for any project. However, estimating projects with accuracy is not always so successful. In fact, many of the issues in project management can be traced back to failed attempts at estimating projects. Whether that be projects that run over time or budget, are short in resources, or a load of other issues. Estimating projects is a skill that you need to acquire to plan better and thus have a better chance at delivering a successful project. Here is everything you need to know about estimating projects for your next project endeavor. You may have found that many times your estimates about a project turn out to be wrong. Poor project estimation can lead to a project running overtime or going over budget, team members may have more work than they can chew, or milestones may be missed. But why is it so hard to properly estimate a project? The answer lies in the nature of estimation in general. When you estimate something, as a human you are susceptible to cognitive errors and different biases. Both these things and the general subjectivity of estimation lead to the possibility of error. One of the main factors or theories explaining why estimation so often goes wrong is known as the planning fallacy. The planning fallacy is a bias that humans have of being overly optimistic. In the case of estimating projects, this means that a project manager will be overly optimistic in estimating how much time it will take to complete a task. Usually, this means assuming a task will take less time than it actually does. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky coined the term planning fallacy. They suggested that the planning fallacy happens as a result of our habit to assume the best-case scenario and ignore historical evidence. The planning fallacy can affect all elements or parts of estimating a project. Estimating projects means being able to accurately forecast the multiple moving parts of a project. This estimation provides your client with a picture of what work or scope is within. Your project. Primarily, you can boil down project estimation into four main parts. These parts of project estimation include effort estimation, cost estimation, time estimation, and resource estimation. Let’s go over each of these four parts in turn. Estimation of effort is pretty much all-encompassing and includes everything from time, capacity, skill requirements, and resource availability. You need to know what effort is needed for the project in order to draw significantly accurate estimates which can be concluded even at the early stages of a project’s life cycle. Cost Estimation in nTask Projects Apart from time, which we will discuss below, the cost is one of the main constraints on project management. Estimating cost-efficiently is essential as without the required budget you and your team will be unable to complete the project, and this could lead to a project failure. By efficiently estimating project costs from an early stage in the project lifecycle, you can ensure you have the required budget to complete the project as well as set client and stakeholder expectations.
