Software Estimation BlogInformation on Cost Estimation & Software Estimating

Professor Charlie Eppes, solving crime no doubt

For a few years, CBS has been running a television show called Numb3rs. The premise is the standard take off on the brothers-solving-mysteries cliché that has been around since at least the Hardy Boys. Granted, Numbers has a couple of differences – the boys are older and employed. Don Eppes, the older of the pair, runs a team of FBI agents based in Los Angeles – a fair step above the amateur sleuthing of the Hardy boys. Charlie Eppes, the younger brother, is a math genius and a professor at the fictional “Cal Sci”.

Each week, Don and his street-savvy FBI team encounter a problem, usually a time sensitive one, which is just too tough to figure out through traditional police work. Like clockwork, Professor Charlie Eppes and his team of socially-awkward yet brilliant mathematicians are able to use some form of advanced mathematics to accomplish a whole list of things from predicting where a kidnapping will happen next to the contents of boxes.

And while a great deal of that is Hollywood magic, taking lab theory and shoehorning it into unrealistic time periods with even less realistic amounts of data, there is one part of the show that I always admire. At some point, the young Professor Eppes must explain a complex, doctoral-level mathematical system in terms that team of FBI agents can understand. This happens every single episode with such predictability that the character in the show have started to expect it, even making jokes and attempting to give their own explanations.

Charlie’s explanations are clearly a plot device to convince the audience that his brilliant mathematical insights aren’t simply a weekly deus ex machine. However, just as Charlie has to explain how his math models the real world, the use of software estimation can often seem just as improbable. True, you can sit back and say “Well, the program relies on parametric modeling of our current situation,” but that look is far more likely to generate blank stares than anything else.

To that end, I’m currently working on a good lay definition of parametric modeling and a few handy examples. Stay tuned for those.

I’ve written before on the predictive nature of estimation software. Using software estimation products as project management software can help show you aspects of your project which you haven’t accounted for, particularly things like risk.

You can't take that leap back

However, software estimation products can do more than highlight areas which you haven’t seen, they can also peer around the corner and show that which you haven’t done yet. Through the software’s rather developed, and mathematically sound, understanding of your project, that understanding can be leveraged towards making theoretical changes.

Think about it this way, software estimation project management software allows you, the project manager to play the “What if…” game. What if I doubled my workforce? What if I reduced everyone’s workload by 10%? What if deadlines were all extended by 10%? What if I assigned every part of the project to just one person?

The questions can seem trivial, even comical, however they point to a very interesting application for such software – they ability to control, limit, and even potentially mitigate risk. The questions I just posed all center around one significant area – the sharing of a workload to make a project easier on employees.

How does making project members work easier help to control risk? Well, for one thing, for projects which are heavily dependent on multiple deadlines all being satisfied in a particular order, specifically where one group is waiting on the work of another, each deadline represents a potential point of failure. By making deadlines easier to achieve, the risk of failure is thus avoided.

Of course, deadlines represent just one area of risk. I like to use them as an example because hard deadlines seem to exist in every area from newspapers to software companies to automobile manufactures. The flexibility of project management software which employees these estimation techniques means that project managers can juggle all sorts of variables in a project finding the optimal mix. In the end, such juggling helps to control the risk of uncertainty.