Accurate Project Estimates Made Easy

Whether you are an agency looking to retain clients or an in-house team considering new work, understanding how to accurately estimate project costs and timeframes is essential. While there is some subjectivity to the estimating process, it’s an art that can be improved with experience and discipline. Click here

A solid estimating process can help keep projects on track and under budget. To do this, a well-defined scope and clearly defined dependencies are critical. This sets the stage for project estimations to be more accurate and helps reduce the back-and-forth that can plague many projects.

Easy & Accurate Estimates for Every Project

An accurate estimating process relies on historical data to provide context and inform predictions. There are a variety of estimation techniques that can be used. One popular approach, analogous estimation, compares current project requirements with similar ones in the past and uses a formula to predict how long the work will take. It’s effective if your team has a lot of relevant project history to reference, but it’s not ideal for more complex work that isn’t comparable to previous projects (like building custom features).

Expertise-based estimation relies on the knowledge of individual team members to provide estimates based on their experience with a particular type of project. For example, a web developer with 20+ years of experience may know how long it takes to build a website based on the other websites they’ve built in the past. This technique can be strengthened with three-point estimation, which considers optimistic, pessimistic, and most likely scenarios to create more robust estimate ranges that account for risks.