How should we estimate the number of engineers our org needs?
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Director of Product/Engineering in Media2 years ago
There are various factors to take into account here:1. I would start by looking at the current number of engineers and the amount of projects, to try and get a sense of engineer/project ratio.
2. Define a roadmap - how many projects needs to be completed let's say in the next year.
3. For each project - evaluate the complexity (or just try and calculate the average, with multiple projects this might be close enough to exact evaluation)
4. Projects that could be done externally at lower cost - consider outsource them.
5. The remaining projects, multiply them by their complexity (in terms of MD) and then you'll know how many engineers you would need to meet those projects timelines.
(6. You can always take some buffer, and add 5-15% more engineers to be on the safe side)
Chief Information Technology Officer in Finance (non-banking)2 years ago
A proper defined roadmap with enough level of detail to assign points and a proper cadence should give you an estimated number, based on your time horizon and then, double that...Senior Vice President, Engineering in Software2 years ago
This is quite a subjective question, to answer at a high level - Look at the number of projects, divide the workforce into dev+QA+BA+SRE+PM and then allocate a proportionate count according to the size of each project. Typically having someone with account ownership and project management experience can help a lot while this estimation is done, you may initially have an accuracy of 50-60% but slowly the processes mature and lead you towards better results.CTO in Education2 years ago
It's different for every organization, size of business, and industry it is in. Also could depend on how much overall technology or network operations are outsourced or maybe even cloud-managed. Overall what is the companies future plans and can the current staffing ratio live up to the desired needs of the organization
1. Do you buy or build? Building requires engineers, buying requires contract managers and subject matter experts.
2. On-premise or cloud? The latter requires fewer engineers to maintain infrastructure.
3. R&D or business IT? The former requires vastly greater number of engineers.
4. Use a method like RICE to estimate your development effort.
5. Do you have a new or an experienced team. If the former, double your estimate.