Padding estimates project management

Email Address:. In time management, the project management processes involving the time management knowledge area are as follows:. When it comes to process 6. Why is this practice not considered professional?

We are searching data for your request:

Padding estimates project management

Wait the end of the search in all databases.
Upon completion, a link will appear to access the found materials.

Content:

• Influencing time, resources and cost estimates quality
• Avoid These 5 Common Issues When Estimating Project Work
• Applying Lean Estimating and Forecasting in Cadence
• Avoiding Problem Of Padding
• Cone of Uncertainty
• Bottom-up Estimating – Advantages and Disadvantages
• Bottom-Up Estimation Technique in Project Management

WATCH RELATED VIDEO: How to Estimate Project Costs: A Method for Cost Estimation

Influencing time, resources and cost estimates quality

Should over estimation be practiced to back up the deadlines, or should the deadlines be based on risk response, mitigation plans, and expert judgement estimations provided by team members? On the other hand, my observation is that even when trying to over-estimate, engineers tend to do the opposite, to under-estimate the time needed to do work.

Under-estimation places unneeded burden on the project for which you have direct responsibility, as well as on other projects which are dependent upon the under-estimated work.

Estimates are hard to make. Whoever is generating your estimates can use feedback to educate the next round of estimations. If the person s estimate a project, track and give them back the actuals for the items they estimated. Then they will have something to calibrate future estimates on. Also, engineers tend to second guess their estimates. Drill to the bottom of the task list, estimate there, and do not adjust anything from there, what it adds up to is what it adds up to.

So, once you have some people who are hitting their marks, and estimating well, you can rely on that, and plan accordingly. Until then, I would suggest a bit of padding be added in presentations outside the group do not pad inside the group. If they are outside it, there will be education on various issues that will not be accounted for in the estimate, but are there. I really experienced significant improvements using PERT-based estimating.

Asking the technical people to provide the worst and best case scenarios as well as what they realistically think it would take to do the task takes off the pressure of the single-point estimating. Let me know. They would tell me three days instead of four hours, just to have that flexibility they are not dedicated to one project. It took a long time to prove to them that a properly prepared project plan I use MS PROJECT that is dynamic in nature, will provide that flexibility and therefore they can be honest in their estimations.

It looks like a no-brainer to you, but having worked the other side of the fence, I have had lots of managers misuse my estimates where I was privileged to make them in the first place , and beat me about the head and shoulders with it later. The more senior the resource is, the more over-estimated will his effort be.

This happens because people tend to stay in the confort zone. It looks nice to tell your boss that the 3 days task was accomplished in 2 days the boss does not know the task could be accomplished in only one day and therefore he gets happy to know it finished in 2.

It does not work to encourage your crew to increase efficiency if your company overestimates errors. Planning is not a profecy, and therefore, its expected to have deviations. If you are the type of boss who blames on people for delays without trying to understand the reasons for those deviation, you should not be surprised if they overestimates the efforts. They are only trying to survive. But on the other hand, if theres mutual trust as David has correctly mentioned and everybody understands the importance of planning, controlling in order to measure the deviations and point out the root causes and replanning, the team members will get easily to the confort zone cause they rely on management and will start working with the project manager for a correct estimate.

What happens in projects is no different than real life. Nobody gets out of the confort zone without motivation. Its the same concept of Inertia Law in which an object will keep still untill a force is applied upon it or the Entralpy theory in thermodinamics.

Motivates people to leave their confort zone and you shall be surprised with the results. This also applies for estimate accuracy. There is a tendency to over-estimation, but my finding thus far in my career is that in spite of this, it tends toward under-estimation compared to actuals. Which fits nicely into my next thought, which is for the people who do the estimates to be exposed to their actuals after completion, so that they can calibrate themselves as estimators.

I remember asking for this at one place I worked, and I was laughed at. David — your reply seemed unnecessarily harsh. It seems I misunderstood what this site is. There is no need to reply to this — I turn the thread back to you all.

I never meant to say that you misused estimates, nor that you beat others over the head with them. As a PMO Consultant, the advice I regularly give is to enter and manage your estimates levels below from where you will report progress.

At Levels 4 and 5 enter the activities verbs to which effort Work hours and resources are assigned. Level 3 becomes Summary Tasks, while the activities at L are Detail Tasks, where estimates, actuals and updates are managed on a day2day basis. The team enters their estimates Work hours and their progress Actual Work , then re-estimate the open effort Remaining Work at the Detail Task level 4 and 5.

If a detail task falls behind by a day, it is unlikely to affect the estimated Finish date of the deliverable Summary Task. So, get accurate estimates from your team and enter them into the Work field. Enter progress into the Actual Work field, and re-estimate using the Remaining Work field. At the end of the project, you will have a basis of information to use for estimating your next project. No Account? Sign up. By signing in, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

Newsletters may contain advertising. You can unsubscribe at any time. Already have an account? Sign in. By signing up, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Enter the email address associated with your account.

We'll send a magic link to your inbox. Email Address. All Sign in options. Enter a Email Address. Tags: Agile. Anonymous October 13, 0 Comments. I am sorry, your sentence does not parse. Robert Vitello Posted October 14, 0 Comments. Robert Vitello Posted October 15, 0 Comments. Excellent, David. I concur. George Jucan Posted October 16, 0 Comments.

Hope it helps. George Jucan. Let me know Thanks Sandhya. George Jucan Posted October 18, 0 Comments. Hope it helps, George Jucan. Sarah Kegley Posted October 23, 0 Comments. Did I miss the point you all were trying to make? Djalma Gomes Posted October 24, 0 Comments. Let me add some more coments over what our colleagues have already mentioned.

David Davison via agile-projectmanagement wrote: It looks like a no-brainer to you, but having worked the other side of the fence, I have had lots of managers misuse my estimates where I was privileged to make them in the first place , and beat me about the head and shoulders with it later. Good points, I have two thoughts. Sarah Kegley Posted October 24, 0 Comments. But you still need to deal with their expectations. Richard Tucker Posted November 15, 0 Comments. Definition, Types, Goals, Challenges, and Trends in Welcome back!

Sign in with Email. Reset Your Password We'll send an email with a link to reset your password. Stay ahead! Get the latest news, expert insights and market research, tailored to your interests.

Sign up with Email. Sign in with email Enter the email address associated with your account. You auth link is expired or incorrect, please try again. Sign up with email Get the latest news, expert insights and market research, tailored to your interests.

Avoid These 5 Common Issues When Estimating Project Work

Various factors affect the course of a project, let's take a look at what you can control and prevent from becoming a problem. Common Project Estimating Mistakes And How To Avoid Them Various factors affect the course of a project, let's take a look at what you can control and prevent from becoming a problem. Lena Software 25 Feb While the estimation stage may seem like a small part of an overall project, it is often the most challenging for people in IT. It is also a crucial stage that cannot be avoided or rushed. There are many different estimation techniques used to try to simplify the process.

Applying Lean Estimating and Forecasting in Cadence

Accelerating product delivery has a direct impact on the profitability of your business. And because our number one raison d'etre is to get you to market sooner, here are 6 tips from Critical Chain Project Management that will ensure your success! But the key here is to use decentralized planning. Decentralized planning means that you get input from the people who will actually be doing the work. As a result, you capture more detail, and therefore you end up with better estimates of task durations. As a result, you will not only have a more accurate plan, you will also have buy-in from the team! The problem with padding individual tasks is that the team knows the padding is there. As a result, Student Syndrome sets in, things slip and end up taking up the buffer. As a result, the project ends up taking longer. Critical chain teaches us to take the padding out of the individual tasks, and create a shared buffer.

Avoiding Problem Of Padding

Compare actuals to estimates. After the work has been done, compare the actual time the work took to the original estimate. Track the percent off either under or over and report that information back to the team members. The best way to improve estimating accuracy is by paying attention. The best way to pay attention is by tracking metrics.

Cone of Uncertainty

Before the project can begin, the manager and the software team must estimate the work to be done, the resources that will be required, and the time that will elapse from start to finish. Whenever estimates are made, we look into the future and accept some degree of uncertainty as a matter of course. Software project planning actually encompasses several activities planning involves estimation — the attempt to determine how much money, how much effort, how many resources, and how much time it will take to build a specific software-based system or product. The appropriate software is for everyone in the project to understand and agree on both why and how that software will be built before the work begins. Project planning is an aspect of Project Management that focuses a lot on Project Integration.

Bottom-up Estimating – Advantages and Disadvantages

A project manager friend of mine recently transitioned into software industry from hardware manufacturing. Specifically, he was referring to the problem of padding in estimation for tasks. Being new to software industry, he was not sure whether the estimates provided by his team members were accurate or padded. The impact of padding could be significant on project schedule. The quality of the estimates directly affects whether or not the project can meet scope, cost and schedule commitments. The accumulation of padding all the tasks can result in overly cautious project schedules and uncertainties across the project schedule. Much of this is attributed to the difficulties in gathering accurate estimates of effort. The reasons for padding the estimate could be many.

Bottom-Up Estimation Technique in Project Management

First, corporate budgets generally include a contingency. Obviously, better estimates could free up some money that could go to improving the site. If you assign an engineer to one job, another to a second, and so on, what do you do when this work is finished?

Project cost estimations help you predict how much you should charge a client for an upcoming project. Break down your projects into workable and acheivable portions with project planning software from Teamwork. Project cost estimating is when a project manager predicts how much a project will cost to complete by calculating time, resources, and other expenses. Estimating the cost of a project happens well before the project work starts.

Should over estimation be practiced to back up the deadlines, or should the deadlines be based on risk response, mitigation plans, and expert judgement estimations provided by team members? On the other hand, my observation is that even when trying to over-estimate, engineers tend to do the opposite, to under-estimate the time needed to do work. Under-estimation places unneeded burden on the project for which you have direct responsibility, as well as on other projects which are dependent upon the under-estimated work. Estimates are hard to make. Whoever is generating your estimates can use feedback to educate the next round of estimations.

Estimating time is one of the most difficult and most unsure activities during the planning phase of the project management process. We had a discussion recently with some colleagues of mine about the extra time that sometimes the developers or the project managers add to their estimates, called padding. There are two extremes about this approach. Sometimes the developers usually younger and inexperienced ones get infected by the flowing optimism and make unrealistic estimates, which you know are impossible to meet.