Project Estimations — from idea to product
Project Estimations — from idea to product
Project estimation process is a fundamental stage of the project management. Today we want to share our way of creating a solid project estimate 🔍
In software development, effort estimation is the process of predicting the most realistic amount of effort (expressed in terms of person-hours or money). Different companies have their own estimation techniques. Unfortunately, many of them just tell you that your project is going to take that much time, no details. And of course customers feel the uncertainty surrounding estimates, especially early in the project.
Wamisoftware team believes that you need to know every possible detail of the project before you can provide a realistic estimate.
We provide the estimation as comprehensive as we can so that our customer in the future can easily analyse if he needs some of the functions at all. And, if he comes back and says, “Well that seems a little more than we want to spend,” we can lean on our work breakdown structure to negotiate the cost down. Let’s take a closer look 👇🏻
At first, our Project Manager Ksenia collects and processes business requirements of our customer. She makes sure we understand the requirements before making any kind of commitment. Ideally, the customer comes with the list of requirements and main features in the form of the terms of reference, but sometimes it’s just a text or a design.
Developers certainly read the terms of reference but they need a shorter and more structured information to ensure more effective workflow. Thus, the goal of Ksenia as a Project Manager is to proofread the specification in order to make a detailed list of all features and decide on the technology stack.
Workflow is planned in iterations, for example, the first iteration can contain design, logic. Mainly, the first iteration is the MVP (a minimum viable product). The next iteration — payments and more complex functionality. The third iteration can be a mobile application.
Project Manager breaks project down into phases, tasks, and subtasks, including a step-by-step description of what the user sees first, for instance, a registration page, a home page, or both combined.
By the way, asking questions is crucial to figure out the things that you (and maybe even your potential client or customer) do not know. Questions are often about seemingly little things like “ What happens if we press this button — is that a new tab or a pop-up window?”
When finished, the tech team is checking the specification and applying a time estimate to each element. You cannot fail to include your team in any discussions related to estimating projects and process.
