How long will the project take ?

[sarettah]

When you fly by the seat of your pants, you either soar like an eagle or you crash and burn. There is usually no in between.

In this day and age, business is done very rapid fire. Clients want their product now at a price they perceive as reasonable and do not understand why you cannot just give them a price and a time frame right this second.

To arrive at the true amount of time that a project really will take requires a fairly thorough analysis of the project. If the designer/analyst has done similar projects in the past, he might be able to give a broad ballpark estimate off the cuff, but usually, any type of accuracy requires an anlysis, a factfinding so to speak.

Unfortunately, we, as analysts/programmers/designers do not have the luxury of telling a client. Ok, give me about 1 week of your time to ask you questions and determine a definition so that I can give you an accurate quote.

Instead we take a quick, high level view of the project and pull a number out of our ass (that number always seems to be "oh, about two weeks")

We hope we get it right or are overestimating. We are usually being very optimistic and underestimating out the ass. It is a very rare ego that thinks it can't pull the project off. It is a very rare programmer that can pull it off.

If you want it real fast, real bad, that's probably how you're gonna get it.



Last edited by sarettah at May 23 2004, 09:15 PM