Services ~ Budgetary & Estimates

Defining a budget for development projects is frequently referred to as an art form. As seems to be true with all business ventures, your cost projection can easily be the subject of “fuzzy math,” with little bearing on reality. Hourly rates for development time, escalation costs for rapid development, and pricing of tools and other resources can fluctuate based on little more than what the client can afford.
 

A budget is one of those pivotal tools that are used across many departments within a company. For the developers, it dictates how much time to spend on specific areas of the application. For the project manager, it’s a baseline used to determine whether the project is on track. For sales or the client, it correlates directly to the success of the effort. It’s no surprise that one of the biggest issues in creating a budget is interpretation.

When you’re identifying the costs of development, be as close to reality as possible. Look at performance of the team members on past projects to get a feel for how long it will to finish the project.

Don’t forget to include costs of integration and deployment. Meetings, security certificates, license fees, quality assurance hours, debugging, documentation hours and material costs, and planning time are all areas that are frequently overlooked. Whether your company will be billing the client for these items or not, they are all valid and substantial expenses of a project. Including them will help you accurately measure the profitability of the solution down the road.