I delivered an estimate today on a larger assignment. The assignment will be given to a freelancer via my company so I have gone into the project in order to specify the assignment based on business requirements and the delivered technical design.
We are only delivering the online part and the technical design documentation was seriously lacking data on this part, so I write up a specification and finally an estimate.
A lot of things about this project worries me, things are improving after we addressed the bad technical design document and we are getting closer to something we can work from.
What troubles me now apart from the deadline, which is defined and some of the project circumstances is that I have based my project on some serious assumptions.
These assumptions are mock-ups and proposals on APIs, which I am unsure as to the client will be able to deliver and if so, will they be able to do it timely.
I read a SCRUM article the other day and a way to address this kind of situation is to add more resouces to the development (programmers in this case), but we are not in that fortunate situation that we have extra programmers.
Perhaps I will be able to help out myself, but I will have to decide together with the freelancer being assigned, man I wish my shop was bigger... at least we assuming it is with all the assignments we have in the pipeline and the ambitions we have listed in our road map