Estimating Costs and Allocating Resources

Hi All,

I have an assignment this week to find blogs, listservs or message boards that provide information on resources that would be useful in estimating the costs, effort, and/or activity durations associated with ID projects.  Last week I looked for information on where to get help on ID projects through the same mediums.  One thing I learned is that there are many blogs for ID out there, but very few that provide help with the project management side of the job.  Yet there are many PM sites that provide information that can be massaged to relate to ID projects.  There are also many resources that provide just what I’m looking for, but they are not in the afore mentioned formats.

That being said, I found a blog in Blogspot by Lisa Dagenais at url http://lisadinstructionaldesign.blogspot.com/2014/06/time-and-cost-estimates-for.html.  Lisa provides a couple of sites that offer helpful information on time estimates.  She mentions that PMs shouldn’t just plug numbers into a spreadsheet.  As you develop a project, development time goes down.  This matches information in my current text, Project Management Planning, Scheduling, and Controlling Projects.  The impression I got from the site is that the post was in response to an assignment like this one.  It made me glad for assignments like this one.

Another site in Blogspot that looks like a response to this assignment, and again for which I’m grateful, is Instruction Matters, http://instructionmatters.blogspot.com/2011/03/estimating-costs-and-allocating.html, by Hollis Easter.  My favorite site the blog lists is How long to develop one hour of training? Updated for 2017.  It contains a couple of tables for different types of training.  The interesting part comes after the tables with the section titled “Unknown factors impact development time.”  It asks questions and makes suggestions the PM needs to keep in mind when estimating.  One of the factors mentioned is the environment of the developers.  If they have a lot of experience the costs may be higher per hour for their experience but that experience could save many hours of development time. 

There are a few sites out there and they grow as more of us post blogs to these assignments.  So keep posting. 

References

Portney, S., Mantel, S., Meredith, J., Shafer, S., & Sutton, M. (2008). Project Management Planning, Scheduling, and Controlling Projects. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons.