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Plan ahead for "quick estimate" requests

By MaryWeilage Editor ·
In this week's Application Developer Management newsletter, author Scott Withrow outlines steps that you can take to plan ahead for those times when your boss asks you for a "quick estimate."

How do you handle "quick estimate" requests? Have any of your "best guess" estimates come back to haunt you? Will you follow the advice Scott Withrow offers in this newsletter?

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by wrlang In reply to Plan ahead for "quick est ...

I would imagine that anyone who has ever been asked for budget numbers on the quick has fallen into this trap.

Best thing to do is refuse to give budget numbers under those circumstances and get time to do it right.

If you have the kind of boss or organization that is so disorgazied it routinely does this, then you need a quick formula. Most people can identify certain costs easily based on previous projects. Use a similar number from a previous project and multiply that number by how unsure you are that the project similarities are. Never done anything like it before and don't know how to do it, take your most expensive project and *10 the cost. This will at least put a checkpoint in the project so that the decision makers and/or people pushing the ill conceived project will come back to you and ask why so much?

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