QAI Global Institute is now offering a Live Webinar on Estimation. This 1 Hour Webinar has been designed specifically to help professionals understand the basics of estimation. The objective is to introduce estimation basics to the participants in order to measure, size and scope-out a software centric project. This webinar will help participants to understand the various estimation techniques prevalent in the market.

Overview

It is no simple challenge to manage software delivery costs and maximize return on investments in today’s fast changing and fiercely competitive business environment. Sizing and Estimation activities impact throughout the organization and encompass an array of factors that aren’t visible at first glance:

• Padding budgets in anticipation of underestimations
• Underestimating future costs of maintenance
• Non inclusion of support costs and business costs
• Non quantification of IT value and benefits for an IT business function
• Project management challenges due to ill defined estimates
• Need to measure productivity

"Costs of IT initiatives will typically exceed original estimates by an average of 100 percent" Standish report survey concludes:

• 52.7% of projects are challenged, meaning they are completed but incur cost and schedule overruns resulting in fewer features than originally specified
• 31.1% of the projects cancelled during the development cycle
• The average schedule overruns for challenged and cancelled projects was 222% of the original time estimates
• On an average challenged projects were with only 61% of the original specified features and functions

Even as the software project execution team readies itself to apply any known or home grown estimation method in a given situation, there is always a dilemma that they face; "Which one is the right Estimation method applicable?" In a typical software services provider organization, it is quite common that the organization supports and delivers a fairly wide variety of services to their clients including:

• Application Development
• Production Support & Maintenance Services
• Product Implementation & Support Services
• Testing/Validation Services
• Infrastructure Management Services
• System Integration Services
• Engineering Services (IT based) etc

Each project variety involves unique delivery processes. As such, Sizing each project variety also requires customized measurement methods.

Benefits

The webinar will help the participants by:

• Providing the participants’ with a broad understanding of the current state-of-art in estimation methods
• Providing exposure to successful estimation methods applicable to their own enterprise context

Webinar Outline

This webinar would include:

• Why is estimation so important
• Impact of estimation (planning, monitoring, metrics etc.)
• Popular Estimation Techniques
• Case Study and Exercise of one of the popular techniques
• Summary, Q&A

Who Should Attend

This webinar would be useful for professionals involved in

• Program Management
• Project Management
• Delivery
• Pre Sales & Marketing
• Quality Process Engineering
• Software Quality Assurance
• Requirements Engineering & Management

Pre-requisites:

• None

Suggested Pre-Readings:

• None