Estimate Activity Durations

Estimate Activity Durations

Estimating the time required (in hours, days, or weeks). It is suggested that you estimate duration in productive hours. If you are estimating in days or weeks then you should not include non-productive hours, weekly offs, availability of more people to complete the work earlier. For example, to fix a door in the building with the estimated resources (man, material, equipment) you estimated duration as 4 hours. Now for example, if 4 people are required to complete the work then human efforts is 16 hours. It is not 2 days! Nor 1 hour with 16 people! Nor 6 days because work starts on 1-Jan-16 and the first day only 2 hours’ work happens then 4 days off because of any reason (a person will not be available, company off, lead time to complete the work, etc) and remaining 2 hours’ work will be done on 6-Jan-16. So this estimation is neither effort, nor schedule, nor time/resource optimization. This is just about how much duration is required to complete the work with the estimated resources.

Estimate Activity Durations (Process Summary)

This table is based on PMBOK 6th Edition of PMI

Inputs

• Enterprise Environmental Factors
• Organizational Process Assets
• Project Documents
• Project Management Plan

Tools & Techniques

• Analogous Estimating
• Bottom-Up Estimating
• Data Analysis
• Decision Making
• Meetings
• Parametric Estimating
• Three-Point Estimating
• Expert Judgement

Outputs

• Basis Of Estimates
• Duration Estimates
• Project Documents Updates

PMBOK 6th Edition Process Summary Table