Calculating Timelines for Realistic Projects 

Have you ever worked on a project with an excessively short deadline? 

Team members were likely putting in unreasonable hours, sponsors were dissatisfied, and tempers were inflamed. It’s also possible that this occurred as a result of someone underestimating the work required to finish the job. 

People frequently underestimate the time required to complete projects, especially when they are unfamiliar with the effort involved. 

For instance, they might not account for unforeseen circumstances or urgent, top-priority work, and they might not take the job’s full complexity into account. This will undoubtedly result in significant negative effects in the future. 

For this reason, precise time estimation is crucial to the success of your project. This article will look at a few techniques for creating accurate time estimates. 

Why Make Accurate Time Estimates? 

One of the most critical project management skills is accurate time estimation. Without it, you won’t be able to acquire commitment from the necessary sign-off parties or estimate how long your project will take. 

Even more crucially for your professional future, sponsors frequently determine a project’s success or failure based on whether it was completed on time and under budget. You must be able to bargain for reasonable spending limits and realistic completion dates if you want to stand a chance of succeeding as a project manager. 

How to Make Accurate Time Estimates

To determine an accurate time estimate, follow these steps: 

Step 1: Recognise the Tasks Needed 

Start by listing every task that needs to be completed as part of the project. To do this thoroughly, use techniques like Business Requirements Analysis, Work Breakdown Structures, Gap Analysis, and Drill-Down. 

Make sure to factor in time for meetings, reporting, communications, testing, and other tasks that are essential to the project’s success. (Our article, Project Management Phases and Processes, provides further information on these activities. 

Step 2: Order These Activities 

Now, please make a list of every action you identified in the order that it must take place. 

You don’t need to include how long you anticipate the activity will take at this point. You might want to make a note of any crucial deadlines, though. For instance, you might need to complete the job of the financial department before it begins its year-end preparations. 

Step 3: Decide who you need to involve

You can generate estimates on your own, or “Ask others to contribute, or present them collectively. 

Get the assistance of those who will actually be doing the work whenever you can because they are likely to have relevant knowledge. They will feel more ownership over the time estimates they develop if you involve them, and they will work harder to reach them. 

Step 4: Make your estimates

Now is the time for your estimations. Below, we’ve included a number of strategies to assist you in doing this. Whatever approach you decide on, keep in mind these fundamental guidelines: 

-Instead of estimating the time needed for the project as a whole, start by estimating the time needed for each activity. 

-Depending on the situation, you may need to go into more or less detail. For instance, you might require a broad overview of time estimates for upcoming project stages, but you’ll likely need specific estimates for the upcoming ones. 

-List all pertinent assumptions, exclusions, and limitations, along with any supporting data sources. This will be useful if your estimates are challenged and help you spot any potential problem areas. 

-Assume that only 80% of the time will be productive for your resources. Allow extra time for unanticipated occurrences, including illness, supply issues, equipment malfunctions, accidents, crises, problem-solving sessions, and meetings. 

-Keep in mind that some of the employees working on your project may lose time switching between their numerous jobs if they are only doing so part-time. 

-Keep in mind that people frequently overestimate their ability to finish tasks and may underestimate this ability dramatically. 

Techniques for Time Estimation

We’ll now examine various methods you might employ to estimate time. Utilising a combination of these methods is likely to be the most effective for you: 

Bottom-Up Estimation 

You can generate an estimate for the project as a whole using bottom-up estimating. Break down larger jobs into more specific tasks, then calculate the time required to perform each one to examine from the “bottom up.” 

Your estimation of the time needed for each task is probably more accurate because you are considering each one separately. The total time required to carry out the strategy can then be calculated. 

Top-Down Estimation 

When employing top-down analysis, you first create an outline of the anticipated timeframe using previous projects or experiences as a guide. 

To verify the accuracy, comparing your bottom-up estimations to top-down estimates can be useful. 

Comparison-Based Estimation 

Comparative estimating involves examining the length of time needed to complete comparable jobs on other projects. 

Estimating parametrically 

With this approach, you estimate the time needed for each deliverable and multiply that estimate by the necessary number of deliverables. 

If you needed to develop pages for a website, you would estimate how long it would take to complete one page and then increase that amount of time by the entire number of pages you needed to create. 

Third-Party Estimation 

You can make three estimates—one for the best case, one for the worst case, and one more for the most likely scenario—in order to account for uncertainty. 

Even while this method needs more work to get three distinct estimations, it enables you to form more acceptable expectations based on an accurate prediction of the results. 

Agile Project Management: Poker Planning 

Anything that is estimated always entails a guess. Prepare for Poker “is a tool to aid in better guessing. It’s a quicker and less time-consuming method for planning quick work sprints in Agile PM. 

Use your estimations. 

You can create your project schedule once you’ve determined the required time for each activity “. Include your estimations in the rough activity list you created in the previous step two. 

After that, you can make a Gantt chart “to establish milestones and deadlines, schedule activities, allocate resources, and schedule tasks. 

Major Points

You must make accurate time estimates if you want to complete your project on schedule and within your allocated budget. Without this ability, you won’t be able to estimate how long your project will take, and you won’t be able to persuade the necessary individuals to work with you to meet your goal. 

Furthermore, you run the risk of accepting impossible deadlines, which comes with all the stress, suffering, and credibility-degrading consequences. 

The following four steps should be followed to estimate time effectively: 

1. Recognise the demands. 

2. Prioritise your duties and activities. 

3. Select the people you must involve.

4. Make your projections. 

If you found this article insightful, you might also be interested in exploring these topics further. Here are five articles that could capture your attention:

1. Self-Coaching Strategies – Discover techniques to coach yourself towards personal and professional growth.
2. Team Management – Learn effective ways to lead and manage a team successfully.
3. Essential Competencies for Managing a Team – Understand the key skills and competencies required for effective team management.
4. Providing for Your People – Explore strategies to support and nurture your team members’ development.
5. Mentoring – Gain insights into the art of mentoring and how it can benefit both mentors and mentees.