Page 130 - DCAP304_DCAP515_SOFTWARE_PROJECT_MANAGEMENT

Software Project Management

Notes 6.3.2 Phase 2: Track EQF to Understand the Project Estimate

As you continue to manage the project, track your initial completion date estimate. Each month
(or in a short project, each week), take five minutes out of your project team meeting and ask,
“When do you think we will finish the project?” Track that estimate on a chart set up with the
release dates on the Y axis, and the date that you asked the question on the X axis.
There are two good reasons for asking this question. First, you continue to focus your project
staff on completing the project. People tend to work on what you, the project manager, focus on.
Second, by asking your project staff, you can discover the various confidences they have in the
release date. When you look at the EQF chart, you can see if people are concerned that the project
won’t meet its release date, or if they’re feeling confident about meeting or beating the release
date. Then you can deal with their concerns or your own.
When you track EQF with your project team, you’re learning more about the project and using
EQF to learn how good your initial estimate was.

6.3.3 Phase 3: Use EQF to Manage Project Concerns

We use the slope of the EQF to make queries like, “Tell me what’s happened in the project to
make you think we will meet/beat/miss the date.” When people become more optimistic or
pessimistic, we want to know why. The EQF not only gives me feedback on my initial estimate;
it also gives me another technique to discuss the project state with the project team.
And once we understand the project team’s concerns, we can deal with them or elevate those
concerns to my management.

If you’re using only one of these techniques to estimate and manage your projects, consider
adding the other two. Every project worth completing has some uncertainty. EQF is a great
technique for displaying project uncertainty and for understanding why the team is uncertain
about the project.

Self Assessment

Fill in the blanks:
6. An ………………….. estimate leads to infeasible plans.

7. ……………….. tends to be overly optimistic about the effort that will be necessary to
adapt the existing code.
8. All projects may not have such dramatic differences between the ……………………… options.
9. Once you have a gross estimate at the …………………… of the project, you can drill down
and create estimates for each of the project components.

6.4 Estimation Techniques

For selecting an estimation technique, the following factors need to be considered:
 Whether the assumptions of the estimation technique match the project.

 Whether the data required by the method is available from a reliable sources.
 Whether the activities covered by the method match the planned activities of the project.
Some of the estimation methods being followed by different types of projects are given in Table
6.1. Please note that these are indicative and not exhaustive. As and when more information is
acquired from the projects, this table would be updated.

124 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY