The controversy regarding estimations is quite notorious in the contemporary business world, yet it is practically unavoidable as long as companies are willing to give their employees credit as intelligent people. As an article by Thomsett (2013) explains, “In the past, the inaccurate estimates of I.T. people were seen more as a reflection of the newness of the industry and, as documented, a result of the power relationships between business clients and their I.T. service providers” (Thomsett, 2013, par. 2).
The author suggests a variety of options for managing the situation, from finding common ground to a downright refusal to provide any estimations to the employees. Since the scale of the conflict of interests in question depends on the unique characteristics of the organization that it takes place, a flexible approach should be adopted to solve it, as my experience has shown.
Working as a project manager in the Company X, I had to face the issues described by Thomsett quite often. Particularly, I was especially familiar with the instance, in which the members of the project tried doubling the amount of resources that they needed, from time limitations to the financial ones.
However, the participants of the project never considered an option of adding 20%-40% to the amount that they asked for, which inevitably resulted in the project completion being delayed. Therefore, as a project manager, I learned that additional 20-40% have to be added to the amount that the staff agrees to. The staff avoided using any complicated tools to increase the value of their performance, though. This detail pointed to the fact that the satisfaction rates among the staff were quite high (Gray & Larson, 2014a).
Reference List
Gray, E. W., & Larson, C. F. (2014a). Chapter 5. Estimating times and costs. In Project management: The managerial process (6th ed.) (pp. 126–155). New York City, NY: McGraw-Hill Publishing Company.
Gray, E. W., & Larson, C. F. (2014b). Chapter 7. Managing risk. In Project management: The managerial process (6th ed.) (pp. 210–251). New York City, NY: McGraw-Hill Publishing Company.
Thomsett, R. (2013). Estimation games. Web.