Forecast your own task durations |
 |
 |
 |
| Written by Graham Stoney |
|
If you work in a team, chances are you've got a project manager who constructs the project schedule including your personal task breakdown; and they will probably come to you to ask for your input. Or, you might have to prepare the schedule for yourself and/or your team. Either way, get in the habit of forecasting your own task durations so you learn to estimate how long things take. Forecasting is a skill like any other, which we learn to do via feedback. A forecasting system with an open loop is unstable. Without the feedback element, any task duration forecasts you make are simply guesses. So before you tackle a major task, estimate how long you think it will take, and then compare how long it actually did take with your estimate. Next time you attempt a similar task, you'll be in a better position to give a more accurate estimate. Once your project manager realises that you're actively working on developing your forecasting skills in this way, they'll pay a lot more attention to your input to the project schedule. They wouldn't be doing their job if they weren't looking for ways to compress the project schedule, and often the project manager's estimates are wildly optimistic. But if you've given them accurate estimates in the past, they'll be more likely to take on board what you say in the future rather than just insisting that you do everything in half the time it will actually take. Projects don't overrun because the amount of work required increased; they overrun because the amount of work was underestimated in the first place. You may need to overcome your own resistance to "getting it wrong" because your initial estimates aren't likely to be very accurate until you've had some forecasting experience. But they're likely to be better than numbers plucked out of thin air by your project manager, and you're more likely to commit to a schedule that reflects your own input. If you have no idea how long a task will take, just give it your best guess. A number plucked out of the air by you is better than one plucked out of the air by your project manager, because you have greater ownership and you'll get the opportunity to refine your guess next time you encounter a similar task. Over time, your intuition will improve the accuracy of those numbers you're plucking from thin air provided you are using the feedback from actual task durations to refine your future estimates. Unless you're extremely structured in your approach to your work, there's little point estimating task durations of less than a day; even a week is a short time in a project that goes for years, and you end up with too many tasks to track efficiently if your scheduling granularity is too fine. You want to get good at estimating the duration of tasks which take months; nobody cares whether a 5 minute task takes 5, 10 or 15 in reality. But whether a 5 month task takes 5, 10 or 15 months makes a huge difference. So focus on forecasting the big picture, feed your estimates to your project manager and compare how long things actually end up taking to your estimates so you can refine them next time around. Social Bookmark this page:          |