Lesson 8 - Project estimations and roles

Table of contents

• Estimating a project - benefits
• Creating a project's estimations
• Fully customizable roles in projects
  • What is the role and how it works?
  • Project's phases with the predefined roles
  • Roles in the Organization's Tab
• Additional questions

Estimating a project - benefits

Ok, we have just created our first brand new project, so now it is time to create time and financial estimations. Remember, creating estimations is optional, but it is very helpful in terms of planning people's work and creating a project's structure.

Estimations help you to quickly:

• create project's phases with the duration, time and financial information

• see detailed charts in the Planning Tab > Summary, where you can analyze the whole project or specific phases and:
  
  • compare estimated hours vs scheduled hours (after creating assignments for team members)
  • compare estimated incomes & costs vs scheduled incomes & costs (after creating assignments for team members)
  • select a specific project phase and analyze its operational and financial performance (possible also in the Budget tab which will be described in the next lessons)

Thanks to that, you are sure that you didn't exceed your estimated budget, e.g. by assigning too expensive people or assigning them too many hours.

• see how team members affect the estimations

Creating a project's estimations

If you want to add a project's estimations go to the Planning > Estimation page in the specific project. Here you can estimate your whole project or specific project’s phases.

In order to add a phase click Add phase button and configure:

• phase name
• phase duration (optional)
• number of hours needed to accomplish phase
• average hour cost (you can input the gross or net cost)
• estimated income for completing phase:
  • if Fixed Price project you can provide overall estimated income for the phase
  • if Time&Material project you can provide overall estimated income or average hour price for your client

Below you can see how to create a project's phase in the:

• Fixed Price Project

• Time & Material Project

• Non-billable Project

The main differences between these 3 billing models during the phase creation are:

• in the Fixed Price Project, you cannot set up hour price for your client (only overall income for the phase)
• in the Time & Material Project, you can set up a project as you want (overall income OR average hour price for your client)
• in the Non-billable Project, you cannot set up both: overall income AND average hour price for your client

Examples

Before assignment creation (the chart shows only estimations)

As you can see I created three project phases: Backend, Frontend and QA with the estimated number of hours for each. On the right side, you can quickly see how many hours I estimated for the whole project or specific project phase, and how many costs and incomes these phases should generate:

Phase Name	Estimated hours	Estimated expenses	Estimated incomes	Estimated profit
Backend Phase	500h	20 000€	52 000€	32 000€

After assignment creation

As you can spot that the chart has changed. Now, it is showing also how my estimations look like against created assignments. Thanks to that I can easily understand did I assign well-suiting people to that project or phase, or not.

What's more Primetric will tell how many hours, costs or incomes did you overestimate or underestimate. Let's compare it:

Phase Name	Estimated hours	Scheduled hours	Estimated expenses	Scheduled expenses	Estimated incomes	Scheduled incomes	Estimated profit	Scheduled profit
Backend Phase	500h	448h	20 000€	49 836€	40 000€	82 500€	32 000€	32 664€

As you can see, created assignments in terms of time are almost fine - we have 52h not scheduled. In terms of costs and incomes, we can see a much bigger problem because during estimations creation I underestimated the average hourly cost of my employee. Thanks to the higher hour price for my client I have avoided loss and profit is much the same as I estimated.

Fully customizable roles in projects

What is the role and how it works?

I think the best way to explain how the project's roles work is to give you an example.

Imagine that you have Bob & Arnie which are Fullstack Developers who sometimes do some backend and sometimes frontend work. Of course, they work in many different projects and you - wise manager - want to know what is the cost ratio between these two (or even more) different activity types. Thanks to roles that are customizable at the organization level, you can easily track these activities in time and financial context, even if your team members have different job positions. 

What's more, you can assign as many roles as you need in each project, so e.g. in Project A Bob can have a Backend role in a first assignment and Frontend Role in a second assignment. For better customization, you can also input to each assignment multiple Assignment Hashtags. It allows you to create advanced reports and filter templates.

Project's phases with the predefined roles

Sometimes adding team members and configuring assignments in a new project can be tedious. What's more in most cases Roles can be associated with the project's phases. This is why we added the possibility to link Roles to the project's phase. 

Thanks to that, when creating a new assignment and selecting the project phase, Primetric will automatically fill in a role associated with the chosen project phase.

How to link role with project's phase?

1. Go to the Planning Tab in a Project's page
2. Create a project phase or edit existing one
3. Input role in the Assignment Template - Role field and click OK button
4. From now, if you create new assignments for your team members and select the project's phase Primetric will automatically add a specific role to the assignment

Roles in the Organization's Reports Tab

You can also create predefined roles in the Organization Tab, so other team members will have ready roles to choose from. To do it:

1. Go to the Organization Tab and select the Role tab
2. Click the Add button
3. Name the role and optionally specify a default hour rate

Additional questions

Do estimations affect a scheduled budget?

No, they don't. Estimations are helpful when you try to check the initial profitability of your project and create a project's structure which will be reflected as a Budget's positions and project phases in the project's calendar.

Go to Lesson 9 - Capacity & Utilization - how are they calculated in Primetric?