PMcrunch

Task estimating is a critical skill for project managers and project teams. We cannot manage what we cannot estimate. However, realistically, it is very difficult to be able to estimate every possible task accurately.

While in many situations, durations to perform a task are well established either through experience or cross industries or cross industry or through personal experience. There are many other situations where such well established time estimates cannot be leveraged. For example, in technology fields, there is not only a learning curve to get up to speed with the new technology but the technology may completely change the structure of the flow of work required to perform the task. In these cases where there is no established norm, we need to devise our own process.

We need to be able to separate the project tasks for which we can clearly estimate and those which we cannot. Then we need to devise as early in the project as possible ways to bring greater certainty to our initial estimates on those tasks that do not have established norms.

For example, on an application development task, we may not have a member on our team with experience on a particular technology. We have two challenges, 1. Getting someone up to speed, and 2. estimating how long it will take, not only to get some talent up to speed but also to sharpen our estimating on related tasks by planning in to our project time for getting our team up to speed with how to do the task and getting our planning up to speed on how long that task or type of task to take is very important.

When estimating projects, it is important to separate the task about which we feel certain and those about which we lack certainty. We need to establish a process for achieving greater certainty in terms of estimating and confidence in performance on all tasks. This can help to improve our estimating not necessarily upfront but earlier and earlier on our projects.

John Reiling, PMP
Project Management Training Online
Tech Training Online