Six Methods of Estimating Task Duration

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The duration of a project is the elapsed time in business working days, not including weekends, holidays, or other non-work days. (Wysocki, 2012, p.184) Detailed below are the various methods for estimating task duration:- Six Methods for Estimating Task Duration Estimating task duration is challenging, you can be on familiar ground for some activities and on totally unfamiliar ground for others (Wysocki, 2012, p. 188). This is high peculiar with the construction industry, where almost every new project comes with high level of unfamiliar challenges regardless of the project manager’s level of experience, making projects duration estimation difficult. Like (Wysocki, 2012, p. 188) further pointed out that in many projects, the estimate will improve as you learn more about the deliverables after having completed some of the project work, therefore re-estimation and re-planning are usually unavoidable. Detailed below are (Wysocki 2012, p. 188) six techniques that are quite suitable for initial planning estimates, which he developed during his consulting practice: 1) Extrapolating Based on Similarity to Other Activities (Wysocki 2012, p. 188) explained that “some of the activities of our Work Breakdown Structure may be similar to activities completed in other of our various projects, the recollections of those activities and their durations can be used to estimate the present task's duration”. “This process in some case may require extrapolating from the other task to this one and in most cases, using the estimates from those activities provides estimates that are good enough”(Wysocki 2012, p. 188). This method can improve to certain extent the accuracy of task duration estimate, owing to the fact that the activity is similar to various other projects carried out previously. This task duration estimation method can to a large extent reduce the task duration

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