Start-up Plan - Voice Recognition System



Project Assignment on Managing projects in Software

Estimation Plan

Main Requirements of the Project

To advertise and recruit required professionals.

To analyze and document the specifications for the required functionality.

To acquire the needed hardware and software as part of IT infrastructure facilities.

To design, implement, test and operate the entire system.

Next step is defining human resources in terms of category, seniority and hourly cost:

Functional expert(s) - Knows the business process

Technical support - Technical product knowledge

Workflow Business Analyst - Workflow tools expert

System Administrator- Maintain workflow environment

Business Analyst - assist in doing a business process analysis

The Number of Programmers and Designers Needed To Finish the Project

These days, the cost of the project is often fixed before the design is done, and sometimes even before design has begun. Estimation now becomes more of guesswork based upon experience that was gained by screwing up earlier estimates. Without the design, it was quite impossible to know how many lines of code/functions/components/objects would be required. The estimator should rely on data and documents available before one starts the design, such as the functional and non-functional requirements, workflows, and use-cases. Therefore, requirements gathering and analysis is very critical to the project's estimation (design, development, and testing).

Using these documents, the estimator may create an object hierarchy tree simultaneously. The object hierarchy tree can help identify different levels/types of objects to be created, what is expected from these objects, and even some attributes for the objects. Therefore, without having an application design in place, the scope of work to be done, in terms of functionality required, can be identified.

Staffing Plan

Next, we need to determine the output of a typical team member. Some companies prefer to segregate team members depending upon the role, position, and pay scale of the team member. A team member's output should be proportionate to the role, position, and salary. A team member's work includes ideas, suggestions, discussions, research, and coding. But their output involves design, documentation, test case designs, coding, debugging, and testing. Usually, an architect would not do any coding. Neither would a tester nor would the project manager. So, the deliverables of each of these is taken differently, as below:

Number of Employees

Job Designation

Estimated Cost

2

Software Engineer

400 hours @ £15,000 /month

4

Programmer Analysts

250 hours @ £20/hour

1

GUI Designer

200 hours @ £25/hour

1

Telecommunications Specialist

50 hours @ £25/hour

1

System Architect

100 hours @ £30/hour

1

Database Specialist

15 hours @ £20/hour

1

System Librarian

250 hours @ £9/hour

There are other roles like deployment manager, SQAs, domain consultants, and what not? The problem here is that many estimates are done before one can determine how many man-hours are involved ...