Top 10 Tips for Accurately Estimating Your New Project

by Anita Sharma VP - Business Development

One of the biggest roadblocks for the successful completion of a project is the lack of proper estimation. At times, project managers tend to under-estimate or over-estimate a project. Estimation, thus, is a critical aspect of project planning, which mainly comprises of a quantitative guesstimate of project resources, costs, or duration. It’s quite tricky to pinpoint accuracy of costs, time, and effort; but if done correctly, it can mitigate risks and guarantee the success of your new project.

There are many ways to conduct project estimation. However, in this post, we will focus only on the top ten tips that can help you craft a reliable and nearly accurate estimate.

1. Know your scope

Before you do any estimation, you have to establish the scope of the project you are working on. Is it long or short, big or small?

Once you have those critical questions answered, then you can come up with the right decision on what resources you will need, to make the project a success. The clearer the scope is, the easier it will be to estimate your resources. Thus, it is good to have a clear understanding of the project scope before doing any form of estimation.

2. Understand the client or stakeholder’s needs

Before making any project estimations, try to dig a little deeper so that you can fully grasp the varied needs of your clients or stakeholders. At times, asking them isn’t enough to understand what the project needs to incorporate. The last thing you would want when dealing with serious clients is coming up with an ambiguous plan. So, identify and document all the expectations and review them with your clients before making any commitments.

3. Break the project into tasks

Smaller assignments are easier to estimate, and it’s less painless to create solid estimates for them. If any single project gets too big, the variables you are focusing on will possibly be too large and abstract. You may end up missing on some crucial things.

4. Know your team’s strength

Before taking on any project and being in a position to forecast its required elements, you must have a good understanding of your team’s strength/weakness. You will find it entirely unproblematic to achieve this, especially if you have an online expense tracker or time tracker in place.

By tracking previous labor and time costs, you will be better positioned to match up specific tasks with the employees who are capable in terms of performance and time-efficiency. In short, you will know which task can be performed by whom, and how his/her efforts can benefit your project for maximum profitability.