1104 Pragmatical education of the estimate for system development making mutual agreement with customers

Abstract

Our company was facing to the troubles from the second half of fiscal 2003 through 2004, that number of system development projects fell into deficit situation. The troubles mostly came from poor estimate skill, project management and information technology skill. Focusing to avoid the estimate skill-oriented troubles, projects that exceed the certain amount of cost in estimate are regularly forced to have an estimate review meeting before submitting to customers. In the meetings we found some estimates had the problems of lack of some terms in the estimate specification, insufficient risk management, vague cost calculation basis, and so on. In order to solve these problems, we thought it was vital that those who can prepare an estimate obtain the skills of preparing a high quality estimate specification and good negotiation skills for mutual agreement with customers. For such a purpose we set up the estimate skill training course. In this paper we report the execution of the estimate skill training course and its results. Further more in near future we are planning to set up the advanced course to perform good negotiation for mutual agreement with customers.