• Task Identification & Work Breakdown Structure
• Task Identification and Work Breakdown


• Assigning Resources
• Assigning Resources
• Team Roles and Responsibilities List
• Responsibility Allocation Matrix


• Identifying Dependencies
• Identifying Dependencies


• Estimating Work & Costs
• Estimating Work and Costs
• Estimating Process and Methods
• Pete's Estimating Laws
• Project Budgets and Cost Tracking
• Tools and Equipment List


• Project Schedule & Critical Path
• Project Schedule and Critical Path
• Scheduling Checklist
• Milestone Table with Driver Tasks


• Make Trade-offs & Optimize
• Make Trade-offs and Optimize
• Project Flexibility Matrix
• Project Alternatives Tradeoff Table
• Product and Project Risk Assessment and Mitigation Tables
• Risk Management Plan


• Create Project Plan Document
• Create Project Plan Document
• Generic Project Plan Document
• Project Plan Example – Small Project
• IT Project Plan Document
• Development Project Plan
• Software Project Plan

Planning and Scheduling: Estimating Work and Costs

Summary: This template describes the process of estimating the work effort and duration for items in the WBS, as well as estimating costs for each item to feed the project budget. Although strictly speaking cost estimating is not part of the "scheduling process," in reality the schedule can't be considered complete without eventually optimizing it for the best balance for the project between scope, time, and resources/costs. Therefore, we've addressed cost estimating in this step of the planning process.

This guideline will help you and your team ...

• Estimate work and costs with active involvement of the people who will actually be executing the work
• Develop a schedule based on hours of work truly required, rather than top-down guesses

What you get:

• Instructions for using the template
• Definitions for estimating work
• Data sources for estimating work
• Detailed steps in the work estimation process
• What NOT to include in work effort and duration estimates
• Categories for cost estimating
• Sample worksheets for Estimating Work Effort and Estimating Detailed Costs for WBS Items