Bulldozer00's Blog

Via work breakdown structures, time cards, and other management tools, most orgs track the time its people spend on projects. Thus, over time, a significant database of historical cost and time data that can be reused to estimate the cost and schedule of future projects gets accumulated. Alas, BD00’s opinion is that most org controllers don’t leverage their treasure troves of information to get reasonable “rev 0” estimates of future efforts. Either :

1. they don’t want to know the truth  – because they’ll cringe at how much time it really takes to execute an average project
2. their tracking systems are so fragmented, un-integrated, and unnavigable that they can’t reuse the info – even if they wanted to
3. both 1 and 2 above

It’s ironic how an average org’s controllers demand detailed planning and certainty from their teams but fail to demand the same standards for themselves, no? The next time you’re asked for a project estimate, try retorting with “what does the historical performance data in our unfathomable vault say about similar projects?“. Awe come on, you can do it – even though I can’t 🙂