Project Scheduling through Task Duration Estimation

Task duration estimation serves as a good practice of scheduling project activities in line with project requirements. This practice embraces a range of methods and techniques (e.g. Wideband Delphi, Backward Estimation, Contingency Planning, others) that estimate time limits and durations of project tasks.

The key idea of the practice is that a project’s overall duration is calculated as total of individual durations of tiny measurable activities and tasks. A smaller activity is easier to estimate for time, so the practice requires reaching the deepest work decomposition.

Here are basic steps for using task duration estimation in project scheduling:

• Define a project to be scheduled
• Identify the project’s time requirements (e.g. final desired completion date, deadlines)
• Decompose the project into smaller activities and tasks
• Check if tasks can be decomposed into sub-tasks
• Estimate time length for each of the tasks/sub-tasks
• Create individual duration estimates for tasks/sub-tasks
• Combine these estimates into an aggregate time spreadsheet that calculates individual durations to determine the project’s overall duration.

	CentriQS Task Estimation Solution Task estimation is "must-have" of effective time tracking solution. CentriQS offers an easy way to estimate task duration. Users can either enter time required for task execution (if task has no sub-tasks) or break tasks down into subtasks, and then estimated duration of parent task will be automatically calculated as total of subtasks estimates.