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Project Management vocabulary · Schedule & Time

Estimate

Meaning in project management, with examples

/ˈestɪmət/nounCore term

In project management, estimate means: An informed guess of how long a task will take, how much effort it needs or how much it will cost, based on experience and the information available.

In Turkish: tahmin, kestirim, öngörü

How it is used

Also a verb: to estimate. Teams give, provide, revise and refine estimates. A rough estimate is made early; a detailed estimate comes later. In agile teams, estimates are often in story points.

Example sentences

  1. Our first estimate was ten days, but after looking at the old code, the developers said fifteen.

  2. Can you give me a rough estimate of the cost by tomorrow? It doesn't have to be exact.

Common collocations

  • rough estimate
  • give an estimate
  • cost estimate
  • revise the estimate
  • time estimate
  • story pointsA unit agile teams use to estimate the relative size of work, combining effort, complexity and uncertainty instead of counting hours.
  • forecastA prediction of how much a project will cost in the end or when it will finish, based on progress and spending so far.
  • baselineThe approved version of a project's scope, schedule or budget, saved so that real progress can be compared against it later.
  • work breakdown structureA tree-like breakdown of all the work in a project, from the main deliverables down to small work packages that can be estimated, assigned and tracked.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Schedule & Time

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