Welcome to my first blog entry - all things project management, from the basics to credentialing yourself and even maturing your organization’s approach to project management. Let’s take a look at one of the more common PM problems - IT project estimates.
One of the biggest in problems in most IT projects comes down to estimating and getting clear about what type of estimates we’re really talking about. Most of the IT professionals I’ve worked with give you a number for an estimate– but I’m never quite sure what that number entails or what they were really trying to cover with that estimate.
Let’s start with some estimate definitions – The first type of estimate is called an “order of magnitude” estimate. This is usually a guess that some upper-level has determined is the right amount of time needed for this project. Do whatever you can to not get stuck with this number, it probably doesn’t have a basis in reality. I’ll cover this in another blog entry.
The next type of estimate is called a ”definitive” estimate and comes in two different types: work effort and duration. Work effort is the time it takes you to complete the work when you exclude all the interruptions. If you started coding at 8:30, the phone rings at 8:45 and you help someone resolve a problem until 9:45, the work effort for that period is only 15 minutes. The second type of estimate is a duration estimate. The duration estimate for the previous example would cover the entire time span between 8:30 and 9:45 or an hour and 15 minutes, regardless of the number of interruptions you’ve dealt with. The bottom line here is that you need both estimate types, because your developers need to think about the work in two different ways – the time the work requires (work effort) versus the time required to completed the work (duration). If the estimates they provide for work effort and duration are the same, they’re not thinking about what it’s really going to take to get the work done.
The bottom line here is that you need to know the difference between work effort and duration. Without knowing the distinction between the two, you won’t know whether you’ve got good estimates for your project or not.
The Leader in Network Knowledge
