Estimating IT Project Costs

Estimating IT Projects Costs
Name
Course
College
Tutor
April 23, 2013
Estimating IT Projects Costs
Accurate estimation of IT projects helps the system developers and the owners to have a clear view of the total expenses to be incurred so that the project remains on budget (Sampson & Domkowski, 2010). There are key processes that an IT project owner must consider in order to come up with an accurate reliable cost-estimates.
Define scope:
In order to have a definite scope of the project, the project developers must gather salient information in relation to the project underway, and document the needs of the end user to ascertain that the project fits the end user requirements. This process also includes documenting the required features and functions of the final project (Sampson & Domkowski, 2010). In order to carry out this process successfully the project developer must have incredible facilitation skills so as to gather information from the end users precisely.
Define Activities:
During this phase, the project developer must create a list of all the activities that must be undertaken in order for the project to be complete. Each activity should be broken down in terms of the cost implications and the end user requirements. Moreover, this helps to ensure that all the phases of the project are assimilated in the budget.
Sequence Activities:
This is whereby the project manager creates a precedence diagram to help him view the project flow (Bloch, 2004). Sequencing the activities entails arranging all the project activities in a sequential order so that the end users and the project managers are well aware how the project activities flow.
Estimate Activity Resources:
This stage entails approximation of the resources that each activity in the project would require like the cost of designing a prototype and the resources needed to accomplish the task. It is easy to estimate the total cost of the overall project w...