Todd Pickett and Bruce G. Elliott

2007 AACE International Transactions, EST.02

AACE International, Morgantown, WV, 2007

Most of us realize the importance of historical project information, but few of us have the methodologies, procedures, and systems in place to effectively utilize this information to improve our project practices and to support the estimation, scheduling, and control of future capital projects. We fail to collect and use our individual and collective project experiences in a comprehensive and standardized way to enhance our future project endeavors. John Nevison (PMNETwork, Vol. III, No. 6) stated that planning is learning from the past. You apply the lessons of the past to a forecast of the future in a way that will allow you to learn from the unfolding present. This paper will discuss how to collect, normalize, and analyze historical project data to develop practical information that can be used to support estimating and scheduling, provide metrics and benchmarking data, develop conceptual estimating and scheduling tools, aid risk analysis, support strategic planning, and improve our project processes.

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