Skip to main content

Project Management Best Practices: Estimating the Work

Apr4_FeatKarlW_11427381_XSParts 1 and 2 of this series presented practices that are useful and effective for laying the foundation for a successful project and planning the project. In this article, adapted from my book Practical Project Initiation, I’ll suggest six good practices for estimating the work you’ll have to do to complete they project.

Practice #12: Estimate based on effort, not calendar time. People generally provide estimates in units of calendar time. I prefer to estimate the effort (in labor-hours) associated with a task, and then translate the effort into a calendar-time estimate. A twenty-hour task might take 2.5 calendar days of nominal full-time effort, or two exhausting days. However, it could also take a week if you have to wait for critical information from a customer or stay home with a sick child for two days. I base the translation of effort into calendar time on estimates of how many effective hours I can spend on project tasks per day, any interruptions or emergency bug fix requests I might get, meetings, and all the other places into which time disappears.

If you track how you actually spend your time at work, you’ll know how many effective weekly project hours you have available on average. My small software group at Kodak did this for several years, as I described in Creating a Software Engineering Culture(Dorset House, 1996). Tracking time like this is illuminating. Typically, the effective project time is only perhaps fifty to sixty percent of the nominal time team members spend at work, far less than the assumed one hundred percent effective time on which so many project schedules are planned.

Practice #13: Don’t over-schedule multitasking people. The task-switching overhead associated with the many activities we are all asked to do reduces our effectiveness significantly. Excessive multitasking introduces communication and thought process inefficiencies that reduce individual productivity.

I once heard a manager say that someone on his team had spent an average of eight hours per week on a particular activity, so therefore she could do five of them at once. Forty hours per week divided by eight is five, right? In reality, she’ll be lucky if she can handle three or four such tasks. There’s just too much friction associated with multitasking.

Some people multitask more efficiently than others, even thriving on it. But if certain of your team members thrash when working on too many tasks at once, set clear priorities and help them do well by focusing on just one or two objectives at a time.

Practice #14: Build training time into the schedule. Estimate how much time your team members spend on training activities annually and subtract that from the time available for them to work on project tasks. You probably already subtract out average values for vacation time, sick time, and other assignments; treat training time the same way.

Recognize that the high-tech field of software development demands that all practitioners devote time to ongoing education, both on their own time and on the company’s time. Arrange just-in-time training when you can schedule it, as the half-life of new technical knowledge is short unless the student puts the knowledge to use promptly. Attending a training seminar can be a team-building experience, as project team members and other stakeholders hear the same story about how to apply improved practices to their common challenges.

Practice #15: Record estimates and how you derived them. When you prepare estimates for your work, write down those estimates and document how you arrived at each of them. Understanding the assumptions and approaches used to create an estimate will make them easier to defend and adjust when necessary. It will also help you improve your estimation process. Train the team in estimation methods, rather than assuming that every software developer and project leader is naturally skilled at predicting the future. An excellent resource is Steve McConnell’s book Software Estimation (Microsoft Press, 2006). Develop estimation procedures and checklists that people throughout your organization can use.

The Wideband Delphi method is an effective group estimation technique. Wideband Delphi builds on the principle that multiple heads are better than one. This estimation technique asks a small team of experts to anonymously generate individual estimates from a problem description and reach consensus on a final set of estimates through iteration. The outputs from the process include a complete list of project and quality-related tasks and an estimate for each task, in whatever units the team chose (such as dollars, weeks, or labor-hours). Participation by multiple estimators and the use of anonymous estimates to prevent one participant from biasing another make the Wideband Delphi method more reliable than simply asking a single individual for his best guess. Chapter 11 of Practical Project Initiation presents a tutorial on the Wideband Delphi estimation method.

Practice #16: Use estimation tools. Many commercial tools are available to help project managers estimate entire projects. Based on equations derived from large databases of actual project experience, these tools can give you a spectrum of possible schedule and staff allocation options. They’ll also help you avoid the “impossible region,” combinations of product size, effort, and schedule where no known project has been successful. The tools incorporate a number of “cost drivers” you can adjust to make the tool more accurately model your project, based on the technologies used, the team’s experience, and other factors. You can calibrate the tool with your own project data to make it an even better predictor of the future. You can compare the estimates from the tools with the bottom-up estimates generated from a work breakdown structure. Reconcile any major disconnects so you can generate the most realistic overall estimate.

Practice #17: Plan contingency buffers. Projects never go precisely as planned. The prudent project manager incorporates budget and schedule contingency buffers (also known as management reserve) at the end of phases, dependent task sequences, or iterations to accommodate the unforeseen. Use your project risk analysis to estimate the possible schedule impact if several of the risks materialize, then build that projected risk exposure into your schedule as a contingency buffer. An even more sophisticated approach is critical chain analysis, a technique that pools the uncertainties in estimates and risks into a rational overall contingency buffer. Chapter 10 of Practical Project Initiation is all about contingency buffers.

Your manager or customer might view these contingency buffers as padding, rather than as the sensible acknowledgment of reality that they are. To help persuade skeptics, point to unpleasant surprises on previous projects as a rationale for your foresight. If a manager elects to discard contingency buffers, he has tacitly absorbed all the risks that fed into the buffer and assumed that all estimates are perfect, no scope growth will occur, and no unexpected events will take place. Sound realistic to you? Of course note. I’d rather see us deal with reality—however unattractive—than to live in Fantasyland.

To wrap up this series of articles, Part 4 will present several practices for tracking your progress and learning for the future.

Don’t forget to leave your comments below


Karl Wiegers is Principal Consultant at Process Impact, www.ProcessImpact.com. His interests include requirements engineering, project management, peer reviews, and process improvement. His most recent book is a memoir of life lessons titled Pearls from Sand: How Small Encounters Lead to Powerful Lessons.


Karl Wiegers

Karl Wiegers is Principal Consultant with Process Impact, a software development consulting and training company in Portland, Oregon. He has a PhD in organic chemistry. Karl is the author of 13 books, including Software Development Pearls (from which this article is adapted), The Thoughtless Design of Everyday Things, Software Requirements, More About Software Requirements, and Successful Business Analysis Consulting. Karl has also written many articles on software development, design, project management, chemistry, military history, consulting, and self-help, as well as 18 songs. You can reach Karl at tinyurl.com/sdpearls.

Comments (2)