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Monthly Archives: April 2016

Uncategorized

Five Steps Before Estimating Work

April 18, 2016 – 4:00 pm

Estimating is hard enough. It is even harder if you are not prepared. Estimating a 20 hour chunk of work is not so hard. Estimating for full projects or large chunks of work can be challenging. Templates can help, but consider the following steps before you begin the estimating process.

Get a clear picture of the work that is being estimated

Many problems with estimation come because the estimator is not really sure what the work entails. You should avoid estimating work that you do not understand. This should not imply that you can know every detail. The estimating contingency is a way to reflect some of this remaining uncertainty.

Determine who should be involved in the estimating process

The project manager may or may not know enough to make the estimates on his or her own. It is usually a good practice to look for estimating help from team members, clients, subject matter experts, etc. This will usually result in the estimates being far more accurate than you would get by yourself.

Determine if there are any estimating constraints

If there are estimating constraints, it is important to know them up-front. For instance, the end-date may be fixed (timeboxed). You should also know if the client expects Six-Sigma level quality in the deliverables, or if the 80/20 rule will apply. It is possible that there may be a fixed budget that cannot be increased. (This would be of interest so that you can reduce the scope of work, if necessary, to meet the fixed budget.) Knowing these constraints will help the estimators make valid assumptions regarding the cost, duration and quality balance.

Determine multiple estimating techniques to utilize if possible

There are a number of techniques that can be used to estimate work. If possible, try to use two or more techniques for the estimate. If the estimates from multiple techniques are close, you will have more confidence in your numbers. If the estimates are far apart, you need to review the numbers to see if you are using similar assumptions. In this case, you can also try to utilize a third (and fourth) estimating technique to see if one initial estimate can be validated and the other rejected.

Document all assumptions

You will never know all the details of a project. Therefore, it is important to document all the assumptions you are making along with the estimate.

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Risk Management Uncategorized

Understand the Risk Tolerance Level in Your Organization

April 4, 2016 – 7:58 pm

All projects have risks and all risks have the potential for negatively impacting the project. You use risk management to determine the risks that are important enough to manage. During the risk identification process, you may encounter many risks that have some likelihood to occur and have a marginal impact to the project. The question to ask is whether the risk has enough impact on the project to worry about (this same question occurs for both qualitative and quantitative approaches). The answer says something about your risk tolerance.

For example, let’s say you identify a risk that is very likely to occur, but has an impact of $100 and one-half day duration. You may choose not to manage it. You cannot list this as an assumption since there is a good chance the risk will occur. However, the impact is small enough that you are willing to absorb the cost if it occurs, rather than deal with managing the risk (which would probably be more costly). Therefore you would choose a risk management strategy of leaving the risk.

In the prior example, the numbers were fairly trivial and the risk was easier to ignore. But, ratchet the impact up a little higher. Let’s say the risk now was $500 and one day duration. What about $100,000 and three months duration? Of course, the answers are all relative based on the size of the project. If your project had a $20,000 budget, a $1,000 risk impact might be worth managing. If your project budget is one million dollars, the risk impact of $1,000 would just be marginal.

When you are performing risk identification, you need to determine your tolerance level for risks. This will help you focus on the risks that are important and above your tolerance level, while ignoring risks where the impact falls below the tolerance level. Risk tolerance is also cultural in your organization. Some organizations are bigger risk-takers and will accept a higher level of risk on projects. They will also tend to have a higher threshold before they chose to manage a risk.

On the other hand, some organizations are more risk-averse. They will tend to accept less risky projects and they will also tend to have a lower threshold to manage risks. For example, let’s say you have a similar project in both organizations. The project managers in these risk-averse organizations will tend to manage risks that a project manager in the other organization might choose to leave.     

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