Determining Task Durations
Determining task durations is the next step in constructing the project schedule. Duration estimating can be as easy as an expert giving you an educated estimate based on their experience, or it can be a complex process involving techniques and calculations to develop estimates—albeit most of these estimates are still based on expert opinions.
Before explaining some of the techniques you can use to complete your task duration estimates, let’s make sure we have a common understanding of activity duration.
Defining Duration
When you are estimating duration, you need to make sure that you are looking at the total elapsed time to complete the activity. For example, let’s say you have a task that is estimated to take five days to complete based on an eight-hour workday. You have one full-time resource assigned to this task, but they have only four hours a day to work on it. That means the actual duration estimate for this task is 10 days.
You...