Estimating Costs and Allocating Resources

This week in my Walden University Project Management (EDU-6145-1) class, I am required to look for sites that offer help with estimating costs, effort, and activity durations associated with instructional design projects. A plethora of information exists to explain the various methods of estimation for projects in general, but I did not find many sites that offer free estimation tools in the form of online apps or downloadable software. Some went as far as to offer free Microsoft Excel spreadsheet templates and explanations about how to construct your own estimation tools. Here is one example: http://konigi.com/tools/schedule-and-cost-summary-calculator. In the past, I have most often created my own estimation tools in spreadsheets since they are specifically designed for performing calculations. This makes the job of calculating cost, effort, and durations simple. It is a matter of looking up a formula in help or online and then copying and modifying it to fit your needs.

The first site I stumbled across that looked interesting was one that offered assistance in understanding the various kinds of estimates from a software development perspective. The site is located at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/jun07/temnenco/index.html. It is not written in relation to instructional design; however, it applies to instructional design in that software project management and ISD are similar work processes. The site explained past and present estimation models and has good and simple graphics to help visualize the processes. It lists some of the available estimation tools in Table 1. At the end is a list of articles outlining best practices and sources for more information. In this article, I especially like how it illustrates the top down and bottom up estimation models as is explained in our course text (Portny, 2008).

One size fits all rules of thumb in estimating instructional design projects are not practical (Greer, 2009). The second useful site I found presents reasonable estimate times for how long it takes to develop one hour of training. The site is located at http://www.astd.org/Publications/Newsletters/Learning-Circuits/Learning-Circuits-Archives/2009/08/Time-to-Develop-One-Hour-of-Training. It might be surprising to you that according it should take about 43 hours to develop one hour of stand-up classroom instruction according to the survey taken in 2009. This is probably still very accurate since the process of instructional design has not changed much in the past five years. If you do find this number surprising, you probably have not ever developed a course that is built on adequate analysis, sound instructional objectives, learning theory, and also required media, lesson plans, and other supporting materials that go along with it. If you are surprised, I am guessing that you probably have developed PowerPoints which some people call the curriculum. Now that I have your attention, explore the site above and see why it takes so much time to develop good instructional products, and note that the site does not include the time it takes for formative and summative evaluations which are typically required of any instructional design project. These need to be added to the time given in the chart.

References

Greer, M. (2009). Michael Greer’s PM Resources. Retrieved from http://michaelgreer.biz/?p=279

Portny, S. E., Mantel, S. J., Meredith, J. R., Shafer, S. M., Sutton, M. M., & Kramer, B. E. (2008). Project management: Planning, scheduling, and controlling projects. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.