For the past three days, a colleague and I have been putting together estimates for a potential client project.
It’s hard.
It’s not that estimating any individual task is hard – that’s easy. Neither is it that working out a sensible list of tasks is hard – that’s straight forward, too.
The hard part is choosing names for tasks that are meaningful to everybody that will be reading the estimates. For instance, I understand what “Initial High Level Design” means, but my manager and clients may not.
The trick is—for each of 120 line items—to find a three or four word phrase that succinctly and completely expresses all the activities and outputs of a five or ten day task. And I’m not good at names.
Since finding an acceptable name is not always possible, we have been rearranged and regrouped the tasks several times, until they were more easily nameable.
The result is an estimation worksheet that is pleasingly complete and accurate. However, turning it into a sensible work breakdown structure for a project plan is another matter altogether.
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