Feb 24, 2009
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Project Management: Getting Started with Estimated Hours
One helpful piece of information to get on a project is estimated hours per task. This is a measure of how much work or effort a particular task will take. Not to be confused with due date (when a task will be done), estimated hours is a reflection of how much of a person’s time the task will take. Knowing this will help you better allocate that person’s time. It will make it easier to juggle tasks across projects and plan out people’s workload.
Getting estimated hours from internal staff can sometimes be hard. First off, people may worry that if they tell you it will take 8 hours, you’ll be mad when its not done by the end of the day. They might also be afraid that if it takes them longer then the estimate, they’ll be penalized. These fears can keep people from giving estimates.
What you need to do is to create a culture of generating estimates. To do this, as a manager, you should approach your team members as team members, rather than vendors. With a vendor, a time estimate is likely a contractual obligation upon which billing is based. It pays to hold vendors to their estimates since is a critical factor in giving them the work. With your team, that same approach will hinder the culture of creating estimates. When starting out, team members need to feel that they can give estimates in a relatively risk free environment.
Explain that the estimates are being used to better plan their workload. Tell them that better planning, and a better understanding of how much time they’ll need to spend on tasks, will help avoid all-nighters or 72 hour work marathons to meet deadlines. Make it a learning process whereby you’ll compare the estimates to the actual time, together, at the end of the project, to see how close they were and how to get better at it. You can even make a game of it by rewarding estimates that come within a factor of 10 of being accurate.
Speaking of factors of ten, that level of accuracy is really a good place to start. Its tough to know if an estimate should be 23 hours vs 27 hours on a task. To get people started, ask for a significant digit between 1-7 and a power of ten. For example, is it 2 hours, 20 hours, 200 hours. Or, is it more like 20 or 70 hours.
I’d go a step further and say the first digit in the estimate must be 1, 2 or 5 — followed by the appropriate number of zeroes. And I advocate that all tasks should be between 8 and 80 hours (1 day and two weeks): if it’s less than 8, combine it with another task; if it’s more than 80, break it up into more discrete deliverables.
Great suggestions, Scott.
Excellent ideas here, have emailed my mum so expect a big reply!