Real Web Project Management: Case Studies and Best Practices from the Trenches

Planning Pitfalls

Project schedules run into trouble for two major reasons: inaccurate effort estimates and “hidden” tasks that were overlooked when the WBS was created. This section will address several activities that consistently run amuck and examine why it happens.

A telling rule of thumb has emerged in the industry, suggesting that effort estimates should be doubled, since they are usually off by 100 percent. This is not due to the fact that developers can't figure out how long it takes to do a job but rather that they are forced to make hidden assumptions about features that were poorly defined up front. For example, the development of your Web site's search engine takes twice as long because the client “assumed” that search results would ...