TOPIC: Help regarding working experience

Hi,

I am preparing to submit my working experience for review (not audit) and i am not sure how to measure PM time spent on project e.g.

project had following tasks:
Analysis and Design
Detailed Requirement Specification Analysis - 20 man/days
Web site design - 10 man/days
Implementation
website coding -50 man/day
Testing, Deployment on live... 10 man/days

in TOTAL: 90 man/days

we have charged to client additional 9 days for PM

My question is how many days should i count for this project, only time charged to client, complete time of project, or some other percentage?

Thanks!!!

Ivan,

The answer is quite simple: Tell them the actual hours that you have really worked on this project. If you actually worked 100 hours on planning (but you billed the customer for 110) then the "correct" number to tell to PMI is 100.

Cornelius thanks for your comment I will do that.

Just for my curiosity how you estimate PM time in general. E.g. if we have project which is 100 man day for coding (let say programming new web site) and additional 10 for spec and testing, how much time should go on PM, I now that this is to general but do you have some rough figure?

Thanks

Ivan,

That's a difficult question because it depends on how "difficult" your customer is. I used to work as a PM for a software development company. The minimum that we used to add for PM work was 30%. But there was this one customer that I had where I regularly added 40% of PM work because they really, really needed more help.

Of course, then there are other areas when you can go much lower. For instance: during the time when actual coding got done, our lead developer would manage the team and my involvement would go down to 10%. But during testing, the PM percentage would go back up to 30% because I needed to be involved and communicate with the customer.

From that I learned that it's best not to talk about a "fixed" percentage, but to look at each "segment" of the project itself, determine how much support the customer really needs (lessons learned are important here) and calculate the PM time accordingly.