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About this lesson
Project estimates of effort, duration, and money are interrelated. Based upon the cost and availability of the resources involved, once you have one of the estimates, you can derive the other two.
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Effort - Duration - Money.docx.docx60.2 KB Effort - Duration - Money - Solution.docx.docx
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Quick reference
Effort – Duration – Money
Project estimates of effort, duration, and money are interrelated. Based upon the cost and availability of the resources involved, once you have one of the estimates you can derive the other two.
When to use
When creating the project plan, you must estimate the tasks and activities. The estimate can be provided in the form of effort, duration, or money and translate one estimate into the terms of the other two. The effort estimate is used by resource managers to plan resource availability. The duration estimate is used when creating the schedule baseline and the money estimate is used when creating the project budget baseline.
Instructions
Project estimates can be created in effort, duration, or money. Once an estimate is established it can be translated into the other two dimensions.
- It is usually easiest to start with effort estimates. The task leader or a subject matter expert should estimate the number of hours or days of work (not calendar time) that are required to complete the task at the specified quality level.
- The effort estimate can be translated into time or money based upon the selection of the resource(s) that will be doing the work.
- To translate the effort estimate into time:
- Determine specifically who will be working on the task.
- Based upon the individuals working on the task and their availability, determine how long it will take them to finish.
- If there are portions of the task that require duration, but not effort (waiting for approval) add the duration to the time estimate.
- Accounting for holidays on the calendar, you can calculate the duration of the activities.
- To translate the effort estimate into money:
- Determine specifically who will be working on the task.
- Based upon their labor rate or billing rate and the required amount of effort, determine how much their work will cost.
- If there is any portion of the task that requires an expense that is not tied to doing task effort, add that to the total. (office supplies, travel expenses)
- These translations can work in reverse. If you have a fixed amount of time or money, you can determine the amount of effort is available to do work by asking the questions in reverse order.
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