Prudent Software Project Estimation Process - Implementation Experience & Demonstration of the Estimation Tool
Mahammad Ali Shaikh & Suresh Chandrasekaran
Lead IT Process Consultant & Principal IT Process Consultant
Cognizant Technology Solutions

Introduction:

Day-by-day, most of the IS organizations feel executing IS projects within the budget is a big challenge. As per 2007 Standish group CHAOS report, over budget, over time and fewer features than planned IT projects, were still common scenario in our industry. So project planning and estimation has become increasingly important for IS organizations to deliver more with less as today's business world demands . Based on process maturity and appetite for estimation, estimation techniques vary in an organization ranging from ‘guesstimate' to industry recognized ‘Function Point' standard ( ISO/IEC 20926).

Also different stakeholders like business sponsors, project managers, development team, sourcing managers have different interests on software estimation. Project sponsor is primarily interested on cost and schedule aspect, where as project manager is interested on complexity of the project to determine effort, and sourcing manager is interested on resource requirements for specific skill set.

Participants will learn:

Key benefits being realized include:

• Provide simple tool for end-to-end estimation process implementation for chaotic organization.
• Provided a starting-point for documenting the high-level requirements & assumptions made during estimation;
• Adaptability for different organizational process maturity;
• Simplified workflow engine developed as part of estimation tool (web version) facilitated estimation reviews and approvals;
• Web-enabled estimation tool facilitated sourcing group of the organization in data aggregation for analyzing trend and optimizing resource demand.

Outline:

• Background
  • Current scenario and business need
• Estimation approach
  • Stakeholders expectation
  • Aligned with organizational direction
  • Industry benchmarking
• Fitted estimation Framework
  • Estimation framework
    • Customization of Wideband Delphi, FP and COCOMO model
  •  Estimation key components
    • Effort considering size of Software
      • Optimistic, Most likely, and Pessimistic effort
      • Adjustment factors
    • Duration (Schedule) estimation
      • Nominal and Pessimistic duration of the project
      • Role involvement for each phase
    • Software development cost
      • Multiple approaches
  • Estimation – expansions
    • Approval process on estimation (web-version)
    • Optimization of resource allocation at organization level
      • Resource data aggregation
      • Optimization strategy
  • Benefits of the estimation process
• Fitted estimation- a tool demo:
• Conclusion

Biography:

Mahammad Ali , PMP, Six-Sigma MBB, is having 10+ years of industry experiences on process and quality and currently working as a lead process consultant for Cognizant Technology Solutions - a CMMi Level 5 and PCMM Level 5 assessed organization.  He accomplished several projects in IT process improvements using industry models or standards like CMMI / CMM, COBIT, Six Sigma, ITIL, PMBOK, and ISO 9000. He led several projects on estimation related to software life cycle and currently leading project on IT service cost estimation for one of the leading pharmaceutical company.

Suresh Chandrasekaran has over 12+ years of experience in Information Technology in the areas of IT Process improvements covering software development, service management and IT governance. Currently he is working as a principal consultant – IT Process Consulting practice in Cognizant. He specialized in Process Assessments, Process Definition & implementation, SOX – IT control solutions and Software Engineering training activities. He had presented papers on process improvement, process automation and on SOX IT compliance in various international conferences. He is a Certified SOX IT Professional (CSOX) from SOX Institute, Certified ISO 20000 consultant by itSMF and Certified Internal Auditor from APEX International, UK.