ESTIMATING TASK DURATION
Task duration can be hours, days, or weeks — depending on the project. Because the following example uses days, the units of measurement are called person-days.
A person-day represents the work that one person can complete in one day.
This approach, however, can present some problems.
For example, if it will take one person 20 days to perform a particular task, it might not be true that two people could complete the same task in 10 days or that 10 people could perform the task in two days.
Some tasks can be divided evenly so it is possible to use different combinations of time and people, up to a point.
For instance, if it takes two person-days to install the cables for a new local area network, one person might do the task in two days, two people in one day, or four people in half a day.
In most systems analysis tasks, however, time and people are not interchangeable.
If one analyst needs two hours to interview a user, two analysts also will need two hours to do the same interview.
Project managers often use a weighted formula for estimating the duration of each task.
The project manager first makes three time estimates for each task: an optimistic, or best-case estimate (B), a probable-case estimate (P), and a pessimistic, or worst-case estimate (W).
The manager then assigns a weight which is an importance value, to each estimate.
The weight can vary, but a common approach is to use a ratio of B = 1, P = 4, and W = 1.
The expected task duration is calculated as follows: