It's time we talk about estimating our work!

This is a very delicate process and, unless you're extremely careful and incredibly practiced, one that is easy to get wrong.

To help with that, I have a "level of effort" (LOE) process that I follow that forces me to be realistic about the project requirements. First I'll fill in all the individual requirements (pulled from the project scoping process) and then I'll work out the hourly effort in terms of best case, expected case, and worst case scenarios.

It's not a fool-proof system, but it's the best process I've found to date.

The two videos in this lesson cover how to use my LOE template as a spreadsheet or as an Airtable base, depending on which you’re most comfortable with. They each talk about different aspects of the estimating process, so be sure to watch both regardless of which tool you prefer.

In the next video I'll show a complete estimate for the WPSessions site rebuild and you'll see how I actually use this as well as the amount of effort I'm anticipating for rebuilding this very website.

Lastly, if you haven't already joined the ​WPSessions Slack workspace​ (and the #bts channel within it), you should do that today!