A Better Way to Estimate a Project
How to estimate a project using the power of AI
“Just tell me how much time and money it will take?”
Whether you are a product manager, a consultant, a freelancer, a software developer, a designer, or an artist you encounter this question now and then when you are dealing with clients.
Any type of client work requires you to estimate the time and effort it takes to get a project done.
Everyone has their own process & methods on how they come up with an estimate. It has now become more of an art than a science.
To find a solution to better estimate a project I found Dowork.ai
It's a project estimation tool that uses AI. According to their website, “Dowork.ai is built for outsourcing businesses and agencies to help them provide accurate project estimates for both internal and external use.”
After watching a video on their website, I quickly signed up for it and started playing around with the tool.
Sign Up & Project Set-Up:
Sign up process was super smooth and quick.
The first thing you need to do is, to create a project. Project creation is a simple 2 step process.
- Name the project
- Invite your team members
And voila you are all set to start the estimation
After the project is set up, you need to create all the tasks needed to finish the project. For each task, you can provide 3 types of estimates optimistic, most likely, and pessimistic.
After creating tasks and assigning estimates to each one of them, you can assign them to different team members. Also, you can define how many people it will take to finish that particular task.
You also need to add resources in the staffing tab, where you can define resources and their hourly rate.
Once that is done, come back to the estimate page where you can define the % buffer that gets added to the overall estimate. After the buffer is defined you can click on the summary and it will show the overall cost and time.
Talk about AI:
Dowork.ai can make predictions based on a few million data points collected from the industry as per their website.
However, I didn’t feel any AI involvement in predicting the time and cost of my test project. It did a simple calculation of multiplying time with the rate which was entered by me. Maybe it’s a feature that they are planning to add in the future.
Conclusion:
I really like the tool. It's very simple and basic but gets the job done.
There are still a lot of areas of improvement in terms of UI/UX. For example, the summary view that shows the cost and overall time to finish the project is not present in the default view.
Also, it's not intuitive enough to know that you first need to add resources and assign tasks to people before you get the estimate.
Thanks for reading.
