Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
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Estimation Blues
George Jucan is an experienced Project Manager Professional (PMP) with 20 years of technical and management experience in complex environments, both in public and private sector. He is well known in the project management community as a successful IT project management consultant, speaker at public events, trainer and author of project management articles.
Both while preparing estimates for bidding in a competitive process or for inclusion in a business case (justification report, etc.) for internal projects, the project manager is faced with the challenging task of providing time and effort estimates based on a fuzzy, high-level description of the project scope. At this level, many times there is not even a high-level WBS developed, so most of the classic estimating techniques cannot be applied.
Theoretically, these initial estimates should be detailed and refined at subsequent steps, but so many times the initial numbers become binding or require extensive explanations for any adjustment, so the project managers spend countless hours trying to reach the most probable estimate to minimize later need for change.
In many cases the project manager assembles a group of the project architects and/or most senior resources in order to discuss as a group each element of the high level scope description in order to agree on a single estimate for each scope item. The sum of these estimates becomes the project estimate, padded heavily along the way to account for incertitude.
While this method has the advantage of levelling out the estimates through negotiations between experts and increasing the level of confidence in the commonly agreed estimates, it also has several disadvantages. Being forced to provide a single estimate …
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"Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious and immature." - Tom Robbins |