Do you excel at predicting the time, funding, and resources
your projects will require?
Whether your organization decides to design a new system,
launch a new Web site, or overhaul your company's policies,
these endeavors will require people, schedules, funding,
resources, requirements, testing, revising, implementation,
evaluation, and many other elements.
You may have seen this phenomenon already: projects are
risk magnets. Why is that?
The possible reasons include the fact that projects
typically involve many dynamic aspects, yet they're often
constrained by finite conditions. These contradictory
forces make it extremely difficult to determine with
pinpoint accuracy the time and effort required, and set the
stage for plenty of budget and schedule "collisions" during
the life of the project.
When my clients or colleagues invariably ask, "How long do
you think this effort might take?" I usually experience a
knee-jerk reaction. Instinctively, a part of my brain that
once excelled at solving math problems on timed quizzes
goes into overdrive. "I know the answer!" it screams.
Yet, unless that project or task is something I've
performed many times before -- under very similar
conditions each time, and with good records of my actual
hours spent -- providing an accurate estimate can be quite
elusive. As I strive to imagine all of the stages and steps
of a process, as well as fathom the unknown variables or
things that could go awry, it's no wonder that I hardly
ever guess 100% correctly, particularly for new endeavors.
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Estimating Techniques Can Help Manage Risks
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Did you know that estimating is an invaluable tool for
anticipating and managing these project uncertainties?
Whenever we can determine our schedule and budget
requirements with reasonable accuracy, it reduces the risk
of running out of time, resources, and funding during a
project.
Yet with all of the emphasis we place on creating accurate
estimates and bids, we still seem to have difficulty
developing realistic predictions of our time and effort. If
we look carefully at the evidence, I believe we'll find
three basic, underlying clues to the reasons for our
challenges with estimating:
-- The presence of hidden or unknown variables that are
difficult or impossible to anticipate, and sometimes even
more difficult to resolve.
-- Our often-idealistic views of our own capabilities. We
tend to imagine that we can accomplish much more than is
possible in the time allocated.
-- A strong human desire to please other people by telling
them what they want to hear. (After all, who wants to be
the bearer of bad news?)
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12 Tips for Increasing Estimating Accuracy
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To remedy these shortcomings, below are 12 ideas for
boosting the accuracy of your estimates:
1. Maintain an ongoing "actual hours" database of the
recorded time spent on each aspect of your projects. Use
the data to help estimate future projects and identify the
historically accurate buffer time needed to realistically
perform the work.
2. Create and use planning documents, such as
specifications and project plans.
3. Perform a detailed task analysis of the work to be
performed.
4. Use a "complexity factor" as a multiplier to determine
whether a pending project is more or less complex than a
previous one.
5. Use more than one method to arrive at an estimate, and
look for a midpoint among all of them.
6. Document caveats, constraints, and assumptions in your
estimates to bound the conditions under which your
estimates would be meaningful. (Anything that occurs
outside of those constraints would be considered out of
scope.)
7. If the proposed budget or schedule seems inadequate to
do the work, propose adjusting upward or downward one or
more of the four project scoping criteria: Cost, schedule,
quality, and features.
8. Consider simpler or more efficient ways to organize and
perform the work.
9. Plan and estimate the project rollout from the very
beginning so that the rollout won't become a chaotic
scramble at the end. For example, propose using a pilot
program or a phased implementation.
10. In really nebulous situations, consider a phase-based
approach, where the first phase focuses primarily on
requirements gathering and estimating.
11. Develop contingency plans by prioritizing the
deliverables right from the start into "must-have" and
"nice-to-have" categories.
12. Refer to your lessons-learned database for "20:20
foresight" on new projects, and incorporate your best
practices into future estimates.
In conclusion, by using a set of proactive estimating
techniques to scope, plan, and constrain your project
conditions, you can dramatically improve your estimating
practices, reduce and mitigate risks, and greatly increase
your project success rate!
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Adele Sommers, Ph.D. is the author of the award-winning
"Straight Talk on Boosting Business Performance" program.
She helps people "discover and recover" the profits their
businesses may be losing every day through overlooked
performance potential. To sign up for more free tips, visit
her site at http://LearnShareProsper.com
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