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Project Managers who work at agencies or dev shops on software, web, creative and tech projects often have the difficult job of taking customer needs and project scopes and trying to determine a cost for the project. This often involves predicting how long each member of the team will spend on their portions of the project. This is a challenge for both new and experienced project management professionals. Templates like these help you to create an initial cost estimate to help both internal and external stakeholders buy into the project. Ideally this process creates an accurate budget and avoid the project going over budget.
Reusable templates like these will allow you to break down your agencies’ software development project into functional tasks that can be assigned to one or multiple people. This helps determine the work effort needed so that financial committments and timelines can be planned. These software development estimate templates can be reused on future projects to help speed up a project at its start.
Here you can find three different free Excel Spreadsheet (.xlsx) project estimate templates. Add in your job tasks, agency hourly rates, and the amount of time it will take to complete them, and it totals the costs. You can also add in other fixed costs such as materials, travel, or other important project expenses.
3 point estimation allows you to add a low (optimistic), most likely (realistic) and high (pessimistic) hourly estimates and uses the PERT standard project management formula to give more weight the most likely estimate number and balance them out. This process helps to take uncertainty into account when compiling realistic estimates for projects.
