I’ve written before on the predictive nature of estimation software. Using cost estimating software products as project management software can help show you aspects of your project which you haven’t accounted for, particularly things like risk.

You can’t take that leap back

However, software estimation products can do more than highlight areas which you haven’t seen, they can also peer around the corner and show that which you haven’t done yet. Through the software’s rather developed understanding of your project’s deatils, that understanding can be used towards making changes.

Think about it this way, software estimation project management software allows you, the project manager to play the “What if…” game. What if I doubled my FTEs? What if I lowered the workload by 15%? What if deadlines were all extended by 10%? What if I assigned every part of the project to just one person?

The questions can seem comical and trivial, but they point to a interesting application for such software – they ability to limit, control and even mitigate risk. The questions I just posed all center around one significant area – the sharing of a workload to make a project easier on employees.

Can making each member of the projects workload easier help lessen the risk invovled? Well, for one thing, for projects which are heavily dependent on multiple deadlines all being satisfied in a particular order, specifically where one group is waiting on the work of another, each deadline represents a potential point of failure. Risk of failure is further avoided by making all the deadlines easier to meet.

Of course, deadlines represent just one area of risk. I like to use them as an example because hard deadlines seem to exist in every area from newspapers to software companies to automobile manufactures. The flexibility of project management software which employees these estimation techniques means that project managers can juggle all sorts of variables in a project finding the optimal mix. Such juggling can help the lessen the risk of doubt, in the end.

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