Question

You have been appointed the project manager of a big project on account of your prior experience of many years in the same field. Your team comprises a mix of experienced and fresh engineers. Explain how you would go about estimating the times and costs, the methods you would choose and the reasons for your choices.

Answer 1

Best way to perform cost and time analysis would be to perform, Bottom-up method:

We will divide group into teams, most experienced person will do basic detailing of project into package, and further packages into individual components. Whereas less experienced individual will perform the task of collecting and arriving at cost of individual basic components. This can be performed by:

a. Arranging offer from Sub-Vendors.

b. Database and past record.

The cost and time then arrived for each component will be further added to arrive at cost of a package which will further be added to arrive at cost of project.

This cost shall be further analysed for

a. optimistic

b. pessimistic

c. realisitc

We will prefer to assign the detailing job to experienced person because in bottom up approach it is very important to reduce our component to least possible size, this kind of detailing would be difficult for a fresher.