Guesstimation of specification in project planning

Your main purpose is to get a practical estimate of the time involved in the project at the initial planning stage. It is essential not only to assist higher management with their planning, but also to protect your team from being expected to do the unworkable.

In order to achieve this goal what you need is the guesstimation. And Guesstimating has got two approaches:

1. Here it is to make your guesstimates of the simple tasks at the bottom of the work break down structure and look for the best trail through the series map.

2. Exercise the knowledge from previous projects in order to improve your guesstimating skills.

Outcome

The effect to these approaches is that you should keep records in an easily accessible form of all projects as you do them. Part of your final project review should be to update your personal data base of how long various activities take. Running with this planning is essential to your success as a manager.

Difficulties

Few find guesstimating as a hard theory. They argue that if they have no experience of an activity, how can they make a worthwhile estimate?

It is a problem. You cannot reach the top of a high building unless you try. If you try for it, you have little to go. Your job depends upon this, so think carefully. Start step by step. Notice, you do not have to be right, merely reasonable. Next, consider the sort of pace you could maintain while climbing a flight of steps for a long time.

Imagine yourself at the base of a flight of steps you know, and estimate a) how many steps there are, and b) how long it takes you to climb them. Apply a little math.

Another thing is to examine how confident you are with this educated guess. If it took you less than a tenth the time, or ten times as long, you would extremely surprised. The point is that from very little experience of the given problem, you can actually come up with a working estimate and one which is far better than no estimate at all when it comes to deriving a schedule. Even though guesstimating takes a little practice, it is very useful skill to develop in our project actualization.

Practical difficulty

The two practical difficulties in guesstimation are:

1. You are too optimistic. Don't think that all of your task will be easy. Come to the reality and consider the problems.

You should build-in a little relaxed to allow yourself some tolerance against mistakes. And it is called defensive scheduling. Thus if you go ahead of the planned schedule you will be success.

2. You will be under the force from senior management to deliver fast, especially if the project is being sold competitively. Oppose the temptation to rely upon speed as the only selling point.

Conclusion

Suggest the criteria of fewer errors, history of adherence to initial schedules, previous customer satisfaction.

All the best!