Radha IyerVice President, Global Data Loss Prevention| Deutsche BankChantilly, Va, United States
Does anyone know if there is an industry standard or rule of thumb to determine the Project Management hours for a typical development project? If the Dev +QA + Architecture = 2000 hrs, how much shoud the Project management hours should be? I have 15% as the baseline in some companies. Could someone please guide? Saving Changes...
Sam SchroederDirector of PM/PMO| Sentry InsuranceStevens Point, Wi, United States
Radya,
I have typically seen 12% - 15% used for PM hours when performing early high-level estimating of a typical development project. However, a quick risk assessment of some other factors may require an increase to 20%. For example: The project is implementing something new to the organization that will require significant strategy and planning or solution selection. Or there are a number of stakeholders from many business units, which will require additional stakeholder management and communications. Or the project team has not worked together previously and/or will be working in a virtual environment.
As a rule of thumb, we have used an estimate of about 10% of a PM per developers. Which means that a project with around 10 devs would require a full time PM for the duration of the project. Saving Changes...
bhawani mittalProject Manager| Alcatel-LucentDelhi, Delhi, India
It requires maximum efforts In Initiating and planning phase .. it may be tune of 40% allocation depending upon the complexity of the project. At initial stage all the requirements, processes, stakeholders are not clear, once it is planned allocation can be reduced. I have seen average 20% allocation for PM. This applies if product/project is a bit stable, if it has lot of issues then allocation can vary if PM is responsible for the project :)
It depends from many factors. On average I estimate 10 to 20% of PM work. But it is important to understand what does fit under PM work. In most of the cases people tend to think that it is how much project manager spends his time on a project. I would point that it is just a part of PM effort. There are many things on top of that. There are internal team meetings, there is a reporting effort and could be other things. As a first thing before estimating % I would ask myself - how should I organize this project, what type of people are involved, where are they located, what are major risks, what technologies do we use, what organization do I have, what roles do I have in a project etc. If most of answers add extra complexity to project it can take even more then 20%. As a top down estimate 10-20% can be considered, but at some point during project initiation I would suggest to do bottom up estimate. Saving Changes...
Radha IyerVice President, Global Data Loss Prevention| Deutsche BankChantilly, Va, United States
Would this change in an agile organization where employees are not collocated and requirements are documented before estimation? Saving Changes...
Agile way of doing things changes a picture a bit. Usually project manager role in that type of project is less important or I would rather say PM is less involved as there is a scrum lead role most likely who takes part of the work. Question is how to estimate scrum lead tasks and role. But I have not seen any agile project with fixed budget. It is fixed at some point but it is not tightly connected with a scope. So I assume precise estimation is not that important. I would still go for 10%+ assuming that scrum lead time is estimated. Saving Changes...
Bryant BakerProject Manager| State of Delaware - Office of PensionsDover, De, United States
I recommend you make your estimate scalable - for example, divide the scope of the PM involvement into three cases. The first case is the absolute minimum involvement of a PM for a project - this usually covers small projects, ones that do not need for example procurement management and planning, no formal communications management and plan, etc. The second case would cover medium-sized efforts; such projects would require more planning in the knowledge areas than the small/simple case. The third case would cover large efforts, where you need to really put an effort into planning. In my organization, the small projects PM time is calc'ed to be 10% of the total estimate; medium-sized projects 20%, and the big ones get 30%. The theory behind this is that the larger the project, the more personnel there are on the project and/or the higher up in the organization it is scrutinized and/or the higher the number of stakeholders there are - requiring greater levels of monitoring and control as well as significantly more communications time and variety of communications media. Best wishes! Saving Changes...
But he warns that these should be treated as a starting point and need to be adjusted for the specific type of project and ideally based on our own organization's historical data.
Saving Changes...
supriya chopraOwner| AnalystSchoolPalatine, Il, United States
Here is the rule of thumb:
Calculate the dev hours : lets assume x
Design is : 30 % of dev hours
Requirements : 20-25% of dev hours
QA is almost same as development ( just the implement components hours)
PM is almost 20 percent of dev hours
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I would say for the Iniation, planning & closure PM effort need to be 100%
During the execution and control, depends on the complex, it can vary from 10 to 30%
for smaller projects, we can go for industry standard of 20% flat. Saving Changes...
