Welcome to Part 4 of our six-part series on managing a millwork design team. In our previous blog posts in the series “A Simple Blueprint to Manage a Successful Millwork Design Team,” we covered the first three steps, defining your inputs, documenting the process, and knowing your capacity. In this post, we will discuss the fourth step, which is estimating your demand.
Step 4: Estimate Your Demand
Now that we have clearly defined inputs, a documented process for our department to follow, and we have evaluated and understand our team’s capacity, we need to next estimate the demand of the work in our backlog. This will allow us to quantify the work that needs to be done in hours that we can overlay onto our capacity, in like units and format, to be able to use to schedule (spoiler alert, this will be our next step).
Too often, millwork companies find themselves in a vicious cycle of landing projects with unrealistic schedule commitment for submittals and deliveries, and they try to work backwards from these dates to now, but without understanding the time that they need to complete the work, they end up “scheduling” dates and durations that they ultimately miss, and these end up affecting work that is scheduled beyond, and you create a snowball of work that you seem to never be able to get through.
So, how do you get out of this cycle of lying to yourselves (and your teammates and clients) about your lead times, and to a place where work is getting done when you say it will?
It starts with throwing out your estimator’s budget hours, and forget about those percentages or formulas based on contract value too (I’m looking at you engineering managers, you know you do it).
Before you can estimate hours, you have to estimate in days. Take your list of engineering tasks, and ask yourself, is this a one day, two-day, five day, or more task? Let’s say for example you think you have a 4-day task. Let’s add a day, for review and any time for errors, now you have a duration of 5 days.
In our previous post on Step 3: Know Your Capacity, we covered how to quantify our team’s capacity using an estimated efficiency factor to account for unplanned events such as lunch and bathroom breaks, and other interruptions. So following the same logic, if we quantify each day at 6 hours of productive work, then we can now quantify this task at 30 hours (5 days * 6 hrs/day = 30 hours).
Now, you can repeat this step for every task in your backlog, until you have enough work to fill at least your next week of work for your entire team. At this stage, we are simply looking to estimate the demand to plan out a full week of work, and then at the end of the week, evaluate how we did against the plan. Once you’ve done this, adjust your estimates a little based on the data from the first week, and now with some confidence in the process, extend out two weeks.
As you repeat this process, collect data, and refine your process, your ability to accurately estimate your demand will continue to improve and become more accurate.
This is an extremely simplified method to estimating the hours for work, but if you are starting at a place where what you’ve been given from your estimates have proven unreliable, or the methods you’ve used historically haven’t yielded a consistent ability to schedule and hit dates, then this is where you need to start.
To summarize, Step 4 is all about quantifying the work that needs to be done first in days, and then in hours, and continually refining this process and the accuracy of our ability to estimate over time based on evaluating the results against our previous estimates.
In our next step, we will cover bringing this altogether to Schedule our Resources!
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