Estimate project deadlines

As project manager, you have to identify, describe in detail and distribute all the work to be produced (the deliverables) so that, together with the team planner, you can build the steering tool that is the schedule.

Project planning is the result of the successive stages of structuring and dividing the project into elementary tasks, then estimating resources in relation to availability, and finally proposing an optimized schedule which constitutes the baseline.

Once the project tasks have been identified (work breakdown structure [WBS]), we need to estimate the duration of each task. This raises three questions:

• Which method to use?

• What precautions should I take?

• Who contributes to estimating lead times?