Three Point Estimating Tool

Description

Estimating is a critical part of project planning, involving a quantitative guess of project costs, resources or duration. Estimation is used for a number of purposes:

– To justify the project, particularly at the proposal stage, enabling the costs to be compared with the anticipated benefits and to enable informed comparisons to be made between different technical or functional options.
– To enforce the disciplines needed to make the project succeed.
– To secure the resources required to successfully deliver the project.
– To ensure that the support impact of the project is fully understood.
– To inform and improve our software development process.

Estimation is made easier when:
– There are solid working relationships between Project Manager and team members, because the more the PM knows about someone’s work and process, the easier it is to create estimates for their work.
– There is a full understanding of the project. The PM and team members should go out and find books, manuals as well as talk to persons working within the necessary field(s).
NOTE:this should include your team members.
– Involve team members in the estimation process – get a peer review before signing off on the document.
– Project managers should expand their skill set i.e. they should believe in continuing education as well as learning about things outside of their direct job role requirements.
How to use:
The tool is simple to use, the idea is list the project tasks and to fill in estimates in best case, mostly likely and worst case columns e.g. 1 , 2 and 5 days. The calculated effort (95%) is then the value to be used in your plans. The tool also generates a guess at the total time to complete all of the tasks.