Thursday, February 7, 2013

Estimating Costs and Allocating Resources: Helpful Resources


Accurate planning is important in project management. Estimating costs and allocating resources poorly can cost a project manager the project, or even their job.


In this blog, I will look at a couple of websites that I think will be useful in estimating the costs, effort, and/or activity durations associated with ID projects. The first contains several articles and tools and is located at http://www.mindtools.com. One article called “Estimating time accurately” is located at http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newPPM_01.htm. This article discusses several steps for making more accurate time estimates and some methods in calculating them. It includes some things we have learned about in our class such as Work Breakdown Structures, top-down and bottom-up estimating, and Gantt charts. These tools, and others, “enable project managers to summarize and organize the various events, activities, and span times of project tasks” (Portny, Mantel, Meredith, Shafer, & Sutton, 2008).

A second site is http://www.projectmanagementguru.com/estimating.html. This site has articles and tools that can be used in the different project management phases. Keeping a project on schedule and on budget takes much planning. And many times projects overrun either or both of these.

One other site that I came across was http://www.pmhut.com/common-tools-for-cost-estimating-in-project-management. This site also has several articles that can assist with project management by explaining different methods and tools that can be used.  

Sometimes project management can feel like these phases:
1.       Wild enthusiasm
2.       Disillusionment
3.       Confusion
4.       Panic
5.       Search for the guilty
6.       Punishment of the innocent
7.       Promotion of non-participants ( PM Hut,2013)

References

Adams, S. (2009). Dilbert by Scott Adams. Retrieved from http://search.dilbert.com/comic/Budget%20Estimate

Mind Tools. (2013). Estimating time accurately. Retrieved from http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newPPM_01.htm

PM Hut. (2008). Common tools for cost estimating in project management. Retrieved from http://www.pmhut.com/common-tools-for-cost-estimating-in-project-management

PM Hut. (2013). Project management funnies—The final chapter. Retrieved from http://www.pmhut.com/project-management-funnies-the-final-chapter

Portny, S. E., Mantel, S. J., Meredith, J. R., Shafer, S. M., Sutton, M. M., & Kramer, B.E. (2008). Project management: Planning, scheduling, and controlling projects. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Sheen, R. (2012). Project management estimating tools and techniques. Retrieved from http://search.dilbert.com/comic/Budget%20Estimate



1 comment:

  1. Nancy,

    All three sites that you found are beneficial tools for PMs and IDs to estimate costs and allocate resources in projects. The first article makes the important point of why time has to be estimated accurately, and provides quality steps on estimating time accurately. For the second link, it was interesting to read about the three types of activities, along with various types of estimating approaches and analyses. The third source indeed has a lot of quality links and articles that can help project managers.

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