QSM provides unparalleled support throughout the product acquisition, installation, and implementation process.
For nearly five decades, QSM has helped organizations bring data-driven discipline to software project estimation, tracking, and benchmarking. Our methodology and tools turn project complexity into measurable, defensible outcomes.
QSM helps reduce risk, increase opportunities, and optimize for capacity.
Designed for: Portfolio executives tasked with submitting annual IT budgets and resource plans.
All too often, annual IT budgets rely on guesswork, wishful thinking, and imprecise placeholders.
Then, later in the year, when execution reality sets in — well, so does the red ink.
Fortunately, QSM is here to help you quantify your project plans, identify high-risk projects, and adjust for reality, including matching resource demand to capacity. We'll help you optimize your portfolio to provide the best possible value with the lowest possible risk.
And that means no more year-end surprises.
We’ll meet with your PMO leaders and executive management to understand the priorities and budget and resource constraints of the organization.
We'll focus our data collection activities on scope, schedule, effort, and staffing by role or skill. We'll reconstruct your existing software, hardware, and infrastructure projects and calculate new estimates as needed to create a comprehensive "as planned" IT portfolio budget scenario.
We'll flag high-risk projects and adjust for realism using industry trend lines. We'll build multiple estimate scenarios, selectively adjusting individual projects to meet critical constraints, resulting in an optimized portfolio with significant cost savings and speed to market.
We'll provide the size, productivity, schedule, resource by skill demand, cumulative cost, and probability of achieving budget goals for each scenario. We help executive managers make data-driven decisions and get the most value from their IT investments.
Quantify the work to be done, or value delivered for the time and money spent
Align productivity assumptions with historical data and adjust scope, staffing, and schedules to achieve strategic goals
Aggregate project resource demand by skill and other characteristics and align demand with capacity
Use QSM industry trends to identify productivity, schedule, and cost assumptions that fall outside of target zones
QSM client uncovers an unrealistic vendor proposal and ineffective execution plan, avoiding major cost and schedule overruns of 9 months, 270 person-months, and $3.3 million dollars.
Case Study · Software Acquisition Department
US Federal agency leverages QSM Consulting and SLIM® estimation software to evaluate vendor bid for mission critical project. Analysis showed that the vendor proposal was unattainable; alternative plan reduced software project costs by $600K.
Case Study · US Federal Government Agency
A major telecommunications equipment supplier implements a mature software estimation process across multiple teams, delivering a $150M system on time, with higher profits and product reliability.
Case Study · Major Telecommunications Equipment Supplier
Corporate estimation group's process, requiring three people over a three-week period, realized over $57K labor cost savings by reducing the estimation team to one person, able to calculate and evaluate several software estimates in less than two days using SLIM®.
Case Study · Corporate Estimation Group
A major utility company's IT department used QSM's software productivity benchmarking and IT portfolio budget analysis services, which identified $2.5M in probable overruns plus $5M in savings, and implements dramatically improved software estimation processes.
Case Study · Major Electric Utility Company
Sometimes you just want external experts to provide objective assessments of your process and projects. We have over 40 years of experience solving problems for clients, plus an external database of over 14,500 software projects to deliver transparent, credible results.
We can provide solutions to fit your timeframe and budget while adding significant value to address your challenges.