Accurate estimation is a key factor in Project Management & success of a project. Most project managers face various challenges in estimation. Especially for project managers who having little experience & novice professionals, this may be a tedious task which may hardly effect to their projects, stakeholders as well as their career. Sometimes, even for well experience project managers, estimation can be a difficult task due to the nature of the project. When the innovativeness of the project outcome increased, the accuracy of the estimation is also going down. As a result of the unexpected incidents can happen in the Research & Development work also can cause expansion of the time schedule estimated. Contingency planning can help project managers to minimize the impact of schedule overruns due to unexpected incidents, but is that a solution to minimize the impact of INACCURATE estimation? If the answer is YES, How can we do a accurate estimation for contingency?. Again it is a problem of estimation.
Further, some of the well known projects managed by the experts also couldn’t complete on time. NASA, AIRBUS(http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/5402922.stm) & recent project LHC(http://www.lhc.ac.uk) are some of the example projects which were experience the schedule overrun.
To avoid the possibilities where can go wrong in tricky task of estimation, software tools & estimation methodologies will give some relief to project managers to make their work somewhat easy. Construx Estimate version 2.0 is one of such tool, which I have come across.
http://www.construx.com
