How To Estimate Projects When You Don’t Know The Requirements? DPM Roundtable
Before hiring your agency, clients need numbers—but how to estimate projects when you don’t know the requirements? No matter what, you’ll need to be able to tell a client how much a project is likely to cost and how long it’s going to take. But how do you make an accurate estimate if you don’t know what’s involved? What if the requirements are incomplete because you’ll discover them along the way?
It’s tempting to assume that working to the Scrum framework or agile principles will make estimating easier. On the contrary: trying to follow a strict Scrum process doesn’t set up our agency with the up-front clarity that clients want when whipping out their chequebooks.
In our first round table discussion, members of the DPM community from around the world get together and talk about how they approach estimation. We go over solutions for the common question that we all ask as digital project managers:
How do you come up with an accurate estimate when all the requirements aren’t defined?
We also touch on a few more project estimation questions, such as:
- How do you handle changes to the original project estimate?
- What is analogous estimating? (We discuss an analogous estimating example)
- In agile or Scrum, how do you communicate your project charges to the client?
- Should an agency charge for project discovery?
- How do you deal with all of the unknowns when estimating projects? (Hint: a solid requirements gathering process has a lot to do with it)
Watch the video here, and share your insight in the comments section. In the round table, we referenced several of our expert DPM articles—links to those resources are below.
- Make Agile Contracts Work For Your Teams & Clients
- DPM Podcast: Contracting The Agile Way (With Alexa Huston)
- How To Estimate Projects: The Complete Guide To Project Budget & Cost Estimation
- Agile Vs Waterfall. What Should You Use For Your Project?
