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Controlling Risk with Estimating Software

July 23rd, 2009 | admin | mp3 audio book

I have given my thoughts on the useful predictions that estimating software can provide. Using cost estimating software products as project management software can help show you aspects of your project which you haven’t accounted for, particularly things like risk.

You can’t take that leap back

However, software estimation products can do more than highlight areas which you haven’t seen, they can also peer around the corner and show that which you haven’t done yet. Through the software’s rather developed understanding of your project’s deatils, that understanding can be used towards making changes.

Think about it this way, software estimation project management software allows you, the project manager to play the “What if…” game. What if I tripled my number of employees? Reducing everybody’s workload? What if you could do it by 10%? What if you could extend your deadlines by 15% or 10%? What if I gave each part of the job to only one employee?

The questions can seem comical and trivial, but they point to a interesting application for such software – they ability to limit, control and even mitigate risk. The questins I have just asked all focus on one very important area – the sharing of duties and tasks to help make a porject less stressufl on employees.

How does making project members work easier help to control risk? Well, for one thing, for projects which are heavily dependent on multiple deadlines all being satisfied in a particular order, specifically where one group is waiting on the work of another, each deadline represents a potential point of failure. Risk of failure is further avoided by making all the deadlines easier to meet.

You must realize that deadlines only take in account for one area of possible risk. I like to use them as an example because hard deadlines seem to exist in every area from newspapers to software companies to automobile manufactures. The flexibility of project management software which employees these estimation techniques means that project managers can juggle all sorts of variables in a project finding the optimal mix. In the end, such juggling helps to control the risk of uncertainty.