This is an excerpt from The Project Estimation Guide. If you found this useful, you can download another sample chapter here.

It takes us 3.65 hours to design and implement a contact form.

I used to work for a web agency that wrote fixed quotes based on hourly estimates. When a member of the sales team is on a call, they are going to have to face a common question from clients at some point:

“How much is this going to cost me?”

The way salesmen answered this question was as such:

Gather requirements from the client, as best they could during the sales call.

Go back to the development team, and ask them for estimates. This would require feedback from both designers and developers.

Take those numbers and multiply them by $XXX.

Report those numbers back to the client.

The client would then ask for a justification of the price.

The salesperson would go back to the designers and developers and asked them why it took “so many hours”.

Designers and developers would either give an answer that the salesman didn’t understand or give the salesman an answer that the client wouldn’t.

???

Profit.

I’m actually not sure how this ever managed to work, but my paychecks never bounced so I presume it did. All of this rigmarole led to a new internal initiative: Developers and designers would track their, time and keep a bank of estimates. That way sales people could patch together estimates based on this data. Pricing web applications would be as easy as ordering off of a Chinese menu.

This new system allowed salesmen to deliver incorrect estimates in a much quicker fashion, and the designers had to deal with the sales team left. Everyone was happy with this arrangement.

Precision != Accuracy

After three projects, we had the following data:

Project 1 — contact form: 2.47 hours

Project 2 — contact form: 5.25 hours

Project 3 — contact form: 3.24 hours

From that, we could average them and decide that a contact page takes on average, 3.65 hours. The sales team takes that number and others like it moving forward and uses them to price out software to clients.

This is an example of being precise without being accurate. Precision is just a reduction in the size of your estimate. Accuracy is how often that estimate hits the mark.

3.65 is about as accurate a number as you can get. We are getting contact forms down to a decimal that represents less than one minute. However, it’s accuracy is 0%. In our sample size so far the agency has never delivered a contact form in 3.65 hours.

Instead, let’s consider offering a different type of estimate:

It takes us between two and six hours to design and implement a contact form.

This estimate is far less precise. However, based on our data, it’s 100% accurate. Every single contact form mentioned was delivered in more than 2 and less than 6 hours.

If you take one thing away from this article, I hope it’s this: