Bottom Up Estimation Essay

In project management, one of the onerous tasks faced by the project managers or companies is how to estimate the project’s resources i.e. time and schedule. Different types of estimation techniques are used in different projects. Two of them are explained below

Bottom up estimation
Bottom up estimation, as the name implies entails judging the cost and schedule of a whole project by aggregating the cost and time required by individual deliverables as specified in the work break down structure. Work break down structure already decomposes the project into smaller tasks, therefore bottom up estimation works by calculating the resources required by each task and finally summing them in the end to get and estimate of the overall project. Usually, in this type of estimation process, the people who are going to work on the project estimate the resources. Bottom up estimation instills team bonding and commitment among the project team members because if they are involved from the very basic level, they in turn get more committed and …show more content…
divide the entire project into smaller and tractable tasks including the work package which is the smallest task in the project.
• Next step is to identify the dependencies between the tasks and allocate resources to each task carefully.
• Aggregate your individual estimates of each task in order to determine the resources needed by the entire project.
Project team members usually employ the three point estimation technique to determine the cost and time of each task. In three point estimating process, team members provide their pessimistic, optimistic and best guess estimates. The Three point estimation technique is regarded as the most accurate estimation process and is commonly used in bottom up estimation.
Example
Consider a simple web design project. Now this project is divided into simpler tasks following tasks and these tasks are allocated to the related team