A lot of the poor estimates come from not taking time to break out the features and subtasks of the project. Planning. Because clients never want to pay for p

A lot of the poor estimates come from not taking time to break out the features and subtasks of the project. Planning. Because clients never want to pay for planning. We spend about 35% of the budget on planning and estimates. And they're usually fairly close, for projects where we've done similar things in the past. When I worked at a smaller dev / consulting shop, we'd be lucky if we got 5-10% of the budget to spend on planning. Short sighted to say the least. Projects succeed or fail based on planning.