Estimating Your Work

How important is estimating your work accurately? Very important. I've spent many a late night at work due to poor estimates. Most estimates fail because many things aren't taken into account when you make your estimate. Some common things are:

• Vacation time
• Holidays
• System Down Time
• Interruptions
• Production Support
• Emergency work
• Sick
• Co-worker on vacation
• Bugs
• Time testing
• Time documenting
• Time training
• Time hiring
• Training classes
• Hard to solve problems
• QA cycle
• Meetings
• Emails
• Co-workers needing help
• Experience of person doing the work
• Support for person doing work

When it comes down to it a lot can go wrong. So the first this is to make sure you don't leave out tasks on your plan. Also it helps to have a history of how long things take to better estimate how long new tasks will take.

In addition, if you miss deadlines you'll get a poor review and can even get fired. 

Estimating is important.

Some of the things that Time-Creator can do for you is:

• Easily track your time so you can know how long similar products have taken in the past
• Track how accurate your estimating is 
• Know percentage of time is spent dealing with non-work type issues
• Help you manage scope creep so that more functions aren't added while keeping the same deadline

Take a look at how Time-Creator can help you.