|
|
|
|
Each month, Tom Mochal presents a set of project management tips and techniques for handling various aspects of planning and managing a project. Tom has developed a number of comprehensive, scalable methodologies, including a project management process called TenStep (www.TenStep.com). Tom also published a popular book called Lessons in Project Management.
It can be challenging to provide project estimates for effort hours, duration and cost. Of the three estimates, you must start off with an estimate of effort hours. Without an idea of the effort hours, you cannot accurately estimate duration or cost.
One of the key factors in converting an estimate of effort hours into duration is to determine a standard for how many productive hours of work you will experience in a typical workday. For example, if you have an activity that you estimate will take forty effort hours; it is unlikely that it can be completed in five eight-hour calendar days. There are many additional work and personal activities to factor into the estimated duration as well. Without taking these into account, it is likely that you will hit your estimates for effort hours, but run over your duration estimates. You need a "reality factor" to convert the estimated effort hours to estimated duration. You need to determine the number of productive hours per day a person is actually going to work. There are normal non-project activities that come up during the day that need to be accounted for. This includes departmental meetings, social conversations with co-workers, doctor’s appointments, sick time, administrative activities, going to the bathroom, etc. You could try to come up with the number of productive hours per day your specific team works, but it would be very tedious. A generally accepted ballpark number for average productive hours per day is 6.0 to 6.5, based on an eight-hour day.
This does not mean that in any one day a person may not be productive for the full eight hours. However, it does factor in a person's productive hours per day over time. For instance, in a 40 hour week, one of your team members may have a one-hour department meeting, spend three hours socializing, leave two hours early one day for a doctor’s appointment, spend one hour on administrative requests, spend one hour on the phone for non-business reasons and spend one hour going to the bathroom and the break room (12 minutes per day). So, during that week the person was available for 31 hours, or six hours and twelve minutes per day.
Share with the team the scheduling assumptions that you are making and your expectations. They must take the responsibility to tell you if outside influences are making it difficult for them to spend the allotted time on the project. That will give you the input you need to change their work responsibilities or else change their availability and productivity factors.
Would you like to receive project management tips every week? Sign up for the weekly TenStep Project Management Tip of the Week at www.TenStep.com.
