Proposals

8th Light Apprenticeship - Day 122

It’s amazing what goes on behind the scenes of a project. Somehow projects suddenly appear, but I’m finding out that there is a lot of work done up front to determine what a client wants, provide a level of estimation, create a proposal and form a team.

Today I paired with Jim on finalising some documentation for a potential client pitch. The estimations had been done, and we needed to present the information in a clear way to highlight the different options that were available, based on team size and duration.

From Jim’s experience, he felt that the optimal team size for a brand new project would be 4, with one pair starting the project and the other pair on boarding a short while later. The client however wanted to explore parallelising work (because delivery speed seemed the most important factor from their perspective), so Jim had identified which part of the project could be done in parallel. We did therefore, calculate a second set of estimates based on having two teams of 4 running in parallel, and compared the figures to one team of 6 and one team of 4 running in parallel.

Just like in our own planning meetings, the estimates had been done using the Pert model, to provide an optimistic and pessimistic figure. This way the client knows the delivery is likely to fall within that given range, and that given budget. In fact, I was surprised that the final costs of the different team sizes did not differ by a huge factor. This was because the extra cost in people was cancelled out by the time saving. What was also interesting was that given the larger team, we would additionally need a full time project manager, because the number of communication channels increases dramatically.

I asked Jim, from his past experience, how accurate the initial estimates usually are. He replied that they are never accurate. Once the client see’s the early deliveries, they provide feedback, and the stories may change, be updated, or reprioritised.

We can only estimate on what we know now and if that scope or our skill level changes as we move forward, the estimates may also change.