Why it is worth using the 3-point estimates to determine the project duration?

In this podcast, Ricardo talks about the advantage of making three-point estimates. He gives tips on how we can obtain more effectively estimates from team members and how we can quickly get important information about the project.

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Episode transcript

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Hello, everyone. Welcome to the five minutes PM. Guest. I like to discuss today with you the three point estimates. I'm not here today, talking about personalities. I just want to explain to you why it's so important instead of addressing only one single duration to a task that you tried to use at least three points and price to create a range. So every time we traditionally, we are planning a project We and to set up durations in to see how much time do we need for that.

And then the person will tell you 10 days, five days, three days, and then you just put this in your Microsoft project, Scotto or a project or, and whatever. And Dan, you try to calculate critical path and everything. And to understand that that line's for this project, I would like to suggest that instead of asking, only at this point, add may be 30 seconds more of discussions and trying to frame an optimistic duration and the pessimistic, the ration, like a wrench.

Now this will not take you too much time, but the results will add a lot of value for you. And I'm not talking that you need to do correlations of standard deviation, variance, nothing. Just talking about this three points. So try not to ask the people and say, instead of asking, how much time do you need? Who say, can you give me a ranch of the ration? For example, you need to paint this wall. How much time do you think you need between WATS and what?

And then the person could tell you, OK, I think I can think this wall between three and seven days automatically, you have pre base as an optimistic and seven days as a pessimistic. And then you can ask a second question. Okay. Based on your experience, if you need to do this a hundred times, because of the things that you will be doing, this is how long, how much time do you need. And then the person can tell, go maybe five days, three days a week, seven days, okay.

Somewhere in between optimistic and pessimistic. It means some point in the ranch that you create them. And then, and what I do, I create a tree Tom's in my project on Merlin, on Microsoft project. And then what do I do? I put this tree information's optimistic, most likely and pessimists, and look, I don't need to calculate the and using the form less and everything, but I can just use one calculation using all optimistic.

The second one with all pessimistic, the turd one with all the most likely and dim, I will have a creeper perception's. And then this will give me a lot of, to think. Let's suppose. First case you have a project where the critical path lamp in the optimistic case is 50 days and the pessimistic 300 days a huge wrench from 52 to 300. This will haze the flag immediately to you.

As a project manager, I need to address risks related to the deadline's of the project because of this. His range is so wide that for sure some risk it's being perceived. Is it on this process? If you have a second case where the optimistic is 50 and the pessimistic is maybe 53, you have a very small ranch. It means that you have a very consistent approach, consistent doesn't need to be interpreted as right, but it's consistent, or you are doing everything grown are, you are doing everything right, but that least you have more confidence in your data.

It's for you, its more reliable and den. This will be a very valuable too. And it's so easy to do that. It's a very valuable tool for you to go to talk to your project board, to go, to talk to your sponsor and say, look, if everything goes completely perfect, finished this project on this timeline, if everything goes wrong and we drive through a more pessimistic does will be on that. Bye. So this will related to the level of tolerance of each company.

So companies that are more conservative, they tend to look more in, give more attention to the pessimist mystic approach, more or less aggressive companies. They tend to look more to the optimistic. This is a management tool for you and in a very simple way, just to give you this street gut feelings about what's going on in your project in a very simple way, does will take you maybe half an hour more, but it will work for a lot of valid for you or even without doing any or a calculation related to the part analysis.

This is a smart way of thinking about timing without adding Monte Carlo simulation of very complex tools. But that least you'll have the better understanding of how your project we'll be framing under all the time. So think about that. I hope you enjoyed this podcast and let's talk more next week with a nod of five minutes BM Podcast.

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