Agaric adaptations of the Civic Actions specifications worksheets

The original: http://civicactions.com/estimating-worksheet

I really like the duration overhead estimate– the principal that if you are involved in the project, you are going to spend some unattributable overhead time simply being involved with the project.

We also like the certainty factor, which we re-termed the Uncertainty factor. Note however that Civic Actions' original spreadsheet pre-fills all certainty values with a 1 (for perfectly certain) leading to an artificially low value as all 300 mostly empty rows are averaged. A fix for this could be checking if there is anything in the total column role before incorporating the certainty value into the average. Really ideally there would be an average certainty for the Proposal and the Recommended estimates.

Manual estimates can entered as line items also, so we removed the separate accounting from the overall estimate sheets (Request For Proposal and Recommended).

We added an optional column. Anything that does not have anything in the RFP column and is marked optional (on a scale of one can do without to five frivolous) can be dropped from the estimate.

We added a "suitable for beginners" column, to flag tasks that could be done potentially by people learning Drupal, including in-house staff or volunteers from the client.

We added an Line Item Actual hours sheet. The problem here is there is no place to record who did what task, and given the multiple columns for multiple roles (but no way to guarantee that roles map to people one-to-one), there's no place to add in who did what either.

(Seriously, it would be so much better to do this in Drupal!)

See also

http://www.lullabot.com/articles/art-estimation