Tag: Estimates

  • Estimation Is Arbitrary – Risk is Out There

    Chris Lema posted about his approach for Estimating Without Requirements and this is one of the most brilliant posts of his that I’ve ever read. When I started my freelance career, the first thing I encountered was the estimation challenge. Working full-time at a company is often estimation-free – you can give some rough numbers in…

  • An Estimate Is Not a Deadline

    I had a few meetings over the last few weeks that were focused on tight deadlines. Two of the clients were burned by other agencies who didn’t deliver so they were already behind schedule and wanted the projects done ASAP. Or even – much faster than ASAP. The Estimate Factor I’ve shared my thoughts on the risks…

  • 7 Reasons Why I Avoid Estimates

    Every time I need to do estimates, I cringe a little. I no longer do estimates for small and medium clients since it creates false expectations and takes a huge amount of time. Estimations, by their very nature, are educated guesses. But the word “guess” doesn’t inspire much confidence. Predicting a project’s exact amount of time,…

  • Why Are Estimates Challenging For Custom Development Work?

    I’ve been browsing and replying on Quora over the holidays and one of the questions made me think deeper about the estimation challenges when quoting custom development work: At DevWP I’ve already blogged about why I avoid estimates and the reason we do provide retainer services for our ongoing accounts. I’m no stranger to budget constraints…

  • How to Determine the Cost of a University Website?

    Pricing is never easy. Estimating work is one of the most tedious activities for me when discussing a new project proposal – let alone a migration or something based on an existing code base. This was the reason for me to write Why Are Estimates Challenging For Custom Development Work? and engage in similar discussions…

  • How to Estimate a Web Development/Design Project?

    “How much does X cost?” is one of the most common (and yet complicated) questions in the software engineering industry. Estimating development projects is rarely a straightforward process, because of the broad gap between “simple” and “truly complex” variation of the same business problem, along with the external context (all 3rd parties) — and let’s…

  • 14 Reasons Why the Website RFP Process Is Really Broken

    One of the most painful roadblocks of the web ecosystem is the practice of creating and submitting RFPs (Request for Proposals). And among the leading reasons why we transitioned to WordPress retainers back in 2014 was precisely due to how broken this process is. (The other key goal was focusing on recurring revenue.) But since…