Poor estimating – Well, well, well…we’re all familiar with this very common cause of project pain aren’t we! I will make a small disclaimer here...poor estimating isn’t the only cause of an over-sized project delivery team. In some instances project managers or team leads will throw resource at a problem rather than looking for creative alternatives but as bad estimating can cause long term damage to delivery I wanted to concentrate on it for the purposes of this article.

Estimating is a core project management skill and yet many see it as a necessary evil to get through before the ‘real work’ can begin. This little transgression is not only short-sighted but possesses the capability to undermine any chance of making the project a success before it’s even started.

The key elements of robust estimating include:

• Ensuring your Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) is complete and signed-off by the key stakeholders;
• Getting the involvement of expert/experience resources;
• Calculate contingency using the totality of risk estimates (estimated cost impact x likelihood);
• Using, where possible, inputs from previous projects/industry sources etc; and
• Consider the skill-set of the resources undertaking the work (more skilled resources will deliver faster); and
• Try to include optimistic, medium and pessimistic estimates. A good calculation is: (O+4M+P)/6

I’d recommend reading a few articles about estimating and talking to someone with experience as well. Once you’ve ticked the boxes above you should have a good foundation from which to launch the project. Your resourcing should be more accurate and can be finessed by reviewing the Earned Value metrics against your time spent against the baseline time forecast for the same period.