how to estimate better and how to be prepared when things go sideways. By Dave Stewart.
✅ “Planned work” may be as little as 20% of the total project effort.
✅ “Extra work” increases proportionally to the complexity of the work.
✅ Account for changes (20%) and unexpected slowdowns (15%).
✅ Access to data, docs, tools, people is a huge estimate trap.
✅ Run postmortems on past projects to anchor yourself to reality.
✅ Estimate with at most 6–6.5 productive hours per day.
✅ Always estimate in ranges, and never in precise numbers.
✅ Safe way to estimate better is to estimate smaller units of work.
✅ Always add at least 15–20% of buffer time: you will need them.
✅ Every new team member speeds up the work by 1.5–1.8×.
🚫 Troubles start when designers aren’t involved in estimates.
🚫 Stakeholders rarely know what causes delays and extra costs.
✅ Re-iterate that late changes are expensive and cause delays.
✅ Life is full of surprises: budget too much, not too little.
✅ When in trouble, raise a hand, rather than doubling down.
As Dave has rightfully noted, much of the work we do is actually happening “around the work” — on the fringes of the project, before, between and beyond actual design work. It covers everything, from daily routine tasks (emails, meetings, reports) to complex dependencies, unknowns and legacy limitations.
In the past, I was always trying to underpromise and overdeliver. I was thinking that ultimately that would put me in a good light — appearing as accountable, reliable and committed to quality work, despite the initial scope. Yet it has also resulted in poor estimates, delays, late night work and overlapping projects.
So instead, I started dedicating time into drafting a very detailed scope of work to estimate better. Typically it includes:
1. That’s how we understood the problem,
2. That’s what we believe the solution requires,
3. That’s the breakdown of tasks we’ll do,
4. That’s the assumptions we make,
5. That’s dependencies we uncovered,
6. That’s data, docs, tools, people need to be involved,
7. That’s how we are planning to solve it,
8. That’s when stakeholder’s (timely) input will be needed,
9. That’s milestones and timelines we commit to,
10. That’s the fixed scope of our final delivery,
11. That’s the delivery date we commit to,
12. That’s how pricing and payment will work,
13 That’s how we’ll deal with late adjustments and scope changes.
And most importantly: for every step of the process — in emails, calls, meetings — make sure to mention that late scope changes are very expensive and will eventually cause delays. So ask for the best channels and frequency for communication with stakeholders. Chances are high that you will need it.
#ux #design
How to improve time estimates