Need a quick, reliable way to estimate your project’s cost or timeline? Analogous estimating harnesses data from past projects to forecast your current one—think of it as learning from history to predict the future. For instance, if a previous fence cost $75 per foot, you might estimate $100 per foot for a similar one today. Many different variables can be compared, … [Read more...]
On January 28, 1986, the NASA Space Shuttle Challenger erupted in a fiery spectacle just 73 seconds after launch, unraveling before one of the largest live television audiences ever recorded at the time. The investigation that followed pinned the catastrophe on a seemingly minor detail: the failure of several O-rings—rubber seals, roughly a foot in diameter—meant to … [Read more...]
In project management, a well-crafted schedule is the heartbeat of success, orchestrating tasks, resources, and timelines into a symphony of progress. The project schedule is the flight plan that brings order to the chaos of competing priorities, and project scheduling is to a project manager like landing an airplane is to a pilot—most people would say it's the most core … [Read more...]
In project management, accurate cost and time estimates can make or break a project’s success. Bottom-up estimating offers a granular approach to forecasting by breaking tasks into smaller components and building estimates from the ground up. In this blog post, we’ll explore how this method drives precision, fosters accountability, and empowers teams to deliver projects … [Read more...]
Once the project has been divided into tasks and resources assigned to those tasks, the next step is to determine the task durations. This may seem trivial, but its importance cannot be understated because these durations will be used to construct the project schedule. Just like the tiny O-rings that brought down the space shuttle Challenger, one small underestimation … [Read more...]
Once the tasks within the project have been defined, the resources required by each task must be determined. To do this, we consult the PMBOK's Estimate Activity Resources process. PMBOK, 5th Edition, Section 6.4, "Estimate Activity Resources" Estimate Activity Resources is the process of estimating the type and quantities of material, human resources, equipment, … [Read more...]
