How to use this tool

Picture the scene - you're a web content manager and you've got a Big Task of migrating all your content from one CMS to another CMS, and you need to estimate how long that will take. You've got 500 pages to migrate, so you migrate 5 of them and time how long it takes. You measure that it takes 170 minutes to migrate 5 pages.

By then multiplying that 170 minutes by 100 to get your 500 pages,  you see that it'll take you 283 hours and 20 minutes of total billable production time to migrate all 500 pages.

But actually, you're not going to be working on migrating content for every minute of your working days, you'll go completely spare! You'll only actually be spending about 70% of the working day on the task, bumping up the real elapsed time to about 404 hours, and 46 minutes.

404 hours is 16 days - but you don't work 24 hour days, you work 7 hour days. You also don't work seven days a week, you work five days a week. So in actual real time that will be elapsing that's going to be 79 working days, 5 hours, and 49 minutes, excluding weekends.

Problem is your managers have left it a bit late to actually start this task, because they forgot that the contract for the existing CMS expires in 14 days. Fortunately there was a significant underspend on another project which the budget holder has agreed can be spent on hiring in some temporary help for you, if you all work 7 day weeks. Phew!

You thus calculate that if there are 4 of you on the task you can get the whole thing done in 14 days, 3 hours, and 11 minutes; that's a squeeze, so you persuade the boss to give you budget for 5 people getting the job done in 11 days, 3 hours, and 57 minutes. Time to spend a bit more time finessing!

This little form snippet is the calculator tool which will let you estimate all that.