Margaret McKnightSr Project Manager| RafterOne, an IPG Company (GearsCRM)St Ann, Mo, United States
All, our management is looking for benchmarks to use for correctly estimating the number of hours a project manager needs on any given project versus project management across all team members. Currently they are underestimating the number of hours it takes and we are not billing for overages resulting from incorrect estimating. Can anyone point me to some stats? Project sizes vary from 250 to 25,000 hours. Saving Changes...
Senior Projects Manager | Field & Marten AssociatesNew Westminster, British Columbia, Canada
Margaret, this is not a clear cut as it depends on so many factors like project type, size, client requirement, and so much more. For example, on some of our projects, we request a PM to be fully allocated throughout the project (8 hours per day), while on other projects only 50%. Saving Changes...
Margaret McKnightSr Project Manager| RafterOne, an IPG Company (GearsCRM)St Ann, Mo, United States
Rami, agreed. We are doing analysis on historical data right now internally. However, that will only provide insight to how poorly sales has been doing with that estimating. Size of the project is always a consideration. Saving Changes...
The approach taken to lead the project and the "heaviness" of your PM standards will also affect the effort involved. For example, a PM tends to be heavily involved up front when taking a predictive approach whereas their effort would be more balanced across the life cycle when following an adaptive approach.
Kiron Saving Changes...
Margaret McKnightSr Project Manager| RafterOne, an IPG Company (GearsCRM)St Ann, Mo, United States
Kiron, really great point! I will add that to the material I will be sharing with our team and manager. Saving Changes...
You might consider different PM factors for different levels of technical complexity.
New and novel projects have more surprises driving higher change activity, than those that may involve thousands of hours but are very similar to past work. Designing many simple but time consuming parts may involve many labor hours, but very little planning, risk, and oversight.
For certain families of projects, we classify them into 4 different types depending on the complexity factors involved. A type 4 would be nearly a copy of prior work, with a 1 involving a lot of new unique design requiring testing and certification. That also helps assign them to PMs, a complex project being someone's whole job or they could manage multiple simpler projects. Saving Changes...
Margaret McKnightSr Project Manager| RafterOne, an IPG Company (GearsCRM)St Ann, Mo, United States
Keith, this is very helpful. We 'size' projects but they are not necessarily grouped by type. I will float this to the team/mgmt and see if they can apply the model to our estimating process. Thank you! Saving Changes...
Even if not distinguishing by "type" per se, identifying major contributing complexity factors will help. If your projects are 250 to 25,000 hours, that is a significant distribution in statistics terms. so it would not suggest an effective one-size-fits-all approach. Even identifying 3-5 complexity factors could give you a way to rank projects as high or low PM effort.
If nothing else, I have always found the discussion of the significant contributing factors in any cost model to be extremely valuable. What really are our chronic issues? It gets people thinking about the complexities in their plans and how to account for them. Saving Changes...
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