Project Estimation: Two Conflicting Trends

By Jed Simms
In a number of organizations I have noticed two conflicting trends:

• Organizations want business cases produced earlier (to prevent wastage of funds)
• Organizations want increased estimation accuracy – typically ± 10%.

While the objectives are totally understandable, they are unrealistic.
If you insist on a business case too early in the project lifecycle you incur a high level of uncertainty — there are many things that you don’t know or don’t know well enough to accurately estimate. Often business cases are generated based on “high level requirements” – but, as we all know, the devil is in the detail and when the ‘detailed requirements’ are later defined they will often blow the budget.


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