Many estimators don’t intuitively think of themselves as planners, yet that’s exactly what they’re doing (formally or not) when they think through a project’s details in order to prepare an estimate. At its essence, planning is preparation for future action, and a good estimator cannot possibly finalize an estimate without knowing what actions will be taken to accomplish the project.

How detailed that planning process becomes during the estimating stage depends on numerous factors, including the time available to prepare the estimate, the value of the project, and its potential risk and impact (positive or negative) on the organization.

But regardless of how much planning is done during the estimating process, firsthand experience with thousands of estimators over the past twenty years indicates there is even greater variance in how much of the estimator’s planning process is captured so that it can be leveraged downstream.

To many organizations, “the estimate” is simply the collection of final numbers arrived at as a result of the estimating exercise. But the real value of the estimator’s work is the thought process that led to those final numbers. Capturing that thought process as a model – with all of its associated variables – streamlines everything that comes after the estimate. Producing resource plans and schedules, performing “what if?” scenarios, and evaluating project changes are just three examples of tasks that are greatly streamlined through access to the estimator’s model.

All of which explains why Hard Dollar’s estimating module is called “Work Planning & Estimating.”

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