Activity Resource Estimating

Activity Resource Estimating is the process for “estimating the type and quantities of resources required to perform each schedule activity” one has to determine, “what resources (persons, equipment, or materiel) and what quantities of each resource will be used”

Techniques used for this are

• Expert Judgment is used for determining which material and which skills and how many of them are necessary to execute an activity.
• Alternatives analysis tries to find other solutions.
• Publishing estimating data contains published information about production rates and so on.
• Project management software is often used to plan resource pools, to develop resource estimates, to organize resource breakdown structures and to offer resource calendars to the project manager.
• Bottom-up estimating is the method, by which a global unit (here the activity) is decomposed into smaller pieces, which can be reasonable estimated and whose single values can be added bottom up to the searched global value.

It results in following outputs

• Activity Resource Requirements document the resource requirements for all activities, which than “[…] can be aggregated to determine the estimated resources for each work packages”.
• Updates of Activity Attributes will surely be evoked, because the estimated resource requirements are activity attributes and must therefore be integrated into those documents.
• The Resource Breakdown Structure “is a hierarchical structure of the identified resources by resource category and resource type”
• Resource Calendars will be generated or updated. They list working periods, availability periods and idle periods of the resources
• Requested Changes might be necessary in comparing scope and other parts of the project management plan with the reality of the resources.