Conducting Estimation meetings with Project

Often an engineering team is asked to predict the future amidst uncertainty.

One way to efficiently drive estimation meetings in this environment is to use the Program, Evaluation, and Review Technique (PERT).

Here is the official article that describes this: Use a PERT analysis to estimate task durations

You can expose the PERT Analysis Toolbar by right-clicking anywhere in the toolbar and enabling "Pert Analysis":

You can then click on the PERT Table button and you get the resultant table:

This is also available through the Tables menus: 

Note: The PERT Table is using the fields Duration1, Duration2, and Duration3 and renaming them.  If you are also using these, your values will show up here, and changing the values in this table will change them wherever else you are using Duration1,2,3.

You can now quickly go through the meeting asking questions like: "How long do you think this is likely to take?" (expected)  and "If that obstacle or constraint is removed, then how long would it take?" (optimistic) and "If that assumption doesn't play out, then how long would it take?" (pessimistic).

When you are done with the session, click the Calculate PERT button and using the default weights (1:4:1) Project will update the Duration field with a calculated duration.

I recommend having the notes field open and documenting the pivot points of the conversation for each task. Split the Window, the show the Notes pane:

1. Window:Split
   
2. Right-click in the entry pane, and select Notes
   

See also:

• More on advanced PERT: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PERT
• Article that shows alternative PERT visualizations: http://www.mindtools.com/critpath.html
• Interesting article on approaches to estimating: http://tynerblain.com/blog/2006/04/28/where-did-you-get-that-estimate/