Estimation is the calculated approximation of a result which is usable even if input data may be incomplete, uncertain, or noisy.
-Wikipedia

How many projects you have delivered on time? How many projects canceled because of missing agreed schedule? How many clients you lost because of your inconsistency is delivery in terms of time, cost, resources? Have you ever calculated, how much you loose because of re-work, time extension, under-estimation or over-estimation? Do you remember which of your projects was completed on time with customer satisfaction or even exceeding client’s expectations? How many times you have fired your employees because of missing schedule? Have you given bonus to employees, who completed your assignment before schedule?

Don’t get lost with my questions…

We estimate everyday and many times a day for so many daily activities. We estimate time needed to drive to office, time required to complete an assignment, time and resources needed to complete a house, schedule and cost required to complete a software project and so on. Sometime we estimate purposefully and sometime its automatically done in mind. If we need estimations in detail and accurate, we spare some time and try to be more analytical. If the kind of estimation is more frequent and/or critical, we try to come up with some sort of template, best practice or widely adopted methodologies. Because of the frequency, we master in the estimation process itself and more and more, we use our experience and past references to refine the process and our estimation will be more close to accuracy.

My involvement in different firms and software ventures as entrepreneur, project manager, CEO, Chairman and many other roles for the last one and half decade and as the faculty on software engineering in various universities, I could enhance my knowledge and experience in software project estimation and management techniques. I had opportunities to train numerous batches of programmers and project managers and with that experience, I could myself acquire some knowledge on estimation techniques during this time, that I want to share with you gradually in my future blog posts.

Estimation job is both challenging and fascinating. Every time you get a new lead, you have new challenges to come out with balanced estimation. Every time you estimate, you improve your own estimation skills and you keep on improving. Every time, you may be using one or the other estimation techniques you know and improve on top of that. Even though, you devote your time, skills and experience on estimation preparation, the outcome may fluctuate in wider spectrum of accuracy. The reason behind the variation in outcome and estimation may be many, but requirement analysis, influencing parameter identification scoping of those parameters, its interpretation, level of competency of project team members and project management process are the major reasons.

We estimate many things. Estimation may include time, cost, schedule of delivery dates, shifts, people skills and required numbers, resources (infrastructure - short term and long-term) and many other attributes depending on the assignments and projects. Accuracy of estimation is directly related to the parameters you consider in estimations. Project manager should be smart and skilled enough to include these parameters as per project demand. The parameters may change on project to project, but some attributes may be same for most of the projects. Accuracy in estimation and project completion as per estimation is the only goal of all project managers. If you estimate accurately and if you can maintain that consistently, the health of your firm is always good. Your client is happy, you are happy and your employees are happy, you have better chance to take up new projects more frequently and your profit goes higher.

I will be discussing in different aspects of estimation and project management in my future blog posts.

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