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To Be Accurate...
Curt Finch (September 8, 2005)

By paying attention to the time spent in the requirements and specifications phases, and correlating estimates to timesheet data, you can more accurately predict and track overall project length. If more companies did, fewer undoable projects would ever start.

Have you ever worked in a place where 10 percent of 10 projects got done instead of 100 percent of one project? Ultimately, nothing is accomplished and everyone is totally stressed out. Inaccurate estimates cause over-commitment of time, yet not much gets done. Inaccurate estimates also cause bad decisions. “Inaccurate” usually means “too low.” When this happens, the return on investment (ROI) calculation shows the project as ‘worth it’ when it is not.

How can you stop wasting your company’s resources on projects that are not worth corporate time? Robert Grady’s book, Practical Software Metrics for Project Management and Process Improvement, gave us the answer more than a decade ago. In it, Grady provides a few insightful rules of thumb that are backed up by real numbers, such as: 6-8 percent of software project time is spent in the requirements and specifications phase. This is based on statistics from numerous software projects at Hewlett-Packard, so the percentage at your company may be different. The good news is that for projects of a particular flavor, you will find that the percentage usually doesn’t vary wildly, so you can use it to predict all project effort required for completion.

Let’s take an example group of projects in an imaginary IT shop in a large company, XYZ Corp. XYZ’s IT shop likes to write special applications on a regular basis (rather than be slaves to SAP or Oracle) and they’ve discovered the following:

All software projects have the following phases:
1. Requirements: What the internal client wishes XYZ would do
2. Specifications: What XYZ is actually going to do.
3. Design: How XYZ is going to do it.
4. Coding: XYZ writes the application.
5. Testing: XYZ tests that it works internally.
6. Rollout: XYZ puts it into production.
7. Debug: XYZ does the first 90 days of maintenance.
After tracking time accurately on seven projects of this flavor, the CIO finds that 6 percent to 15 percent of all engineering hours are spent on phases ‘a’ and ‘b’ combined, with an average of 10 percent.

Now a new project comes up: the Wizbang Application Integration Project.

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