What do you do when you have to put a project into the budget and nobody has any idea what sort of number to use? No SMEs, no industry look-up manuals … Welcome to crowd-sourced estimates!
All you can do is try to find something that seems somewhat similar in some manner: scale, complexity, etc. and decide if yours should be more or less than that. It’s not scientific; it’s just better than nothing. Over time, we will end up collecting a rich list of projects that have been identified in many different industries; over time, cost drivers will emerge. Caveat emptor, of course. The value of the data grows with the amount of it.
The more entries we have, the better it will work; over time, as the entries add up, we’ll put it into a more interactive frame. Please put me into that situation sooner!
If you’d like to add your experience, please do. The more data points there are, the more useful the database becomes.
Click here to go to the project cost data entry page
Here’s the database. For reasons of space, it shows just the top-level project information. You can sort it, and you can search for particular words. If you want to see the full record of a project (minus identifying data fields), click the link. Choose that link also if you want to edit the record (only the person who entered it, or the site admins, can edit it).