Time Estimations Question...

[swiley]

Hello,

I have been tasked by my Project manager to find out if there are any industry "standard" or "common" formulas for determining how long it should believably take to develop things in Cognos 8.  The two modules we are using will be Report Studio and Framework Manager.  We have several projects that we are looking to develop... but we just need to come up with some "realistic" numbers for the hours that it will take to accomplish each project so that we can inform upper management and executive sponsors, for the approvals to go-ahead.  Nothing all too fancy, just a quick-n-dirty approach to rough estimating.

I was wondering/hoping if anyone out there might be willing to share how THEY roughly estimate the number of hours a given task will take to develop, when asked by management?  I'm not necessarily looking for templates or software or anything like that... just a good ole fashioned quickie formula that would "roughly" tell how many man-hours it would take to develop a given concept... assuming one developer working full time with an "Average" Cognos skillset.  I'm figuring that it would most likely involve the number of reports that need to be written in Report Studio as well as the number of tables and filters that need to be set up in Framework Manager.  And I'm sure that the complexity of these things would be a factor too, but I'm hoping that some of you out there could share any tidbits on how YOU would come up with a "rough" estimate that is on the realistic side, if you were tasked by your superiors to come up with an estimate of how much effort it would take for you to develop something.  :)

Thanks a bunch, in advance! :)

-Stan

[COGNOiSe administrator]

"Two weeks!", to quote "Money Pit". I highly recommend watching it.

Anyhow, yes you are correct. Sometime it takes 5 minutes (Great Outdoors) sometime it takes 5 days per report. Without knowing the layout of the reports and your DW structure, it'd be very difficult to give you any realistic advice.

[Sajmumma]

Depends if you are following any standard project methodology - cognos has CSIM which is pretty good.

Its a good idea to bucket reports into simple, medium complex, complex and very complex

In my experience, avg for reports simple-complex is  probably around 3 days including documentation and test.