From Product Description to Cost: A Practical Approach Volume 2: Building a Specific Model

Annotation Parametric cost estimating, when properly used, is a very powerful and cost effective technique. Unfortunately, this technique is often misunderstood and rejected by many potential users for whom it could be a beneficial tool. The development of an agreement on how to use it and how to recognise its limitations is a major benefit to the cost estimating community. From Product Description to Cost: A Practical Approach: presents different ways of parametrically forecasting costs, and the advantages and disadvantages of these methods by using real examples from the mechanical, software and building industries; discusses most of the mathematical procedures which are useful for parametrically forecasting costs; introduces the judgement needed to audit the ways in which these forecasting techniques are used, firstly as a process, and secondly as a tool to generate estimates. Volume 2: Building a Specific Model is divided into nine parts and focuses on the building of 'specific' cost estimating models. These models explicitly refer to a 'product family', and, as opposed to 'general' models, any company (if properly organised) can build these models. Understanding the procedures is key in creating successful specific models; for this reason all these procedures are fully described in this volume. Classical methods and new ones (such as the "bootstrap") are described and illustrated.