Featuring “How to Produce Better Cost Estimates for Medium- to Large-Scale Software Development Projects”

At the U.S. DOT Volpe Center, effective and efficient project management (PM) is part of everything we do. We take our role as non-Congressionally appropriated government employees seriously and align with the Secretary’s strategic priority of “Organizational Excellence.” In fact, our PM abilities have become so well known among our sponsors—federal, state, and local governments, non-profits, private sector, and academia—our team of experts are often called upon to serve as honest brokers and help keep projects successfully moving on time, on schedule, and in scope.

Which is why we’re proud to launch our new “Ask the Software PM Experts” series, which is meant to share best practices, tips, and ways to help you keep your software development projects on track. Over the next few months, some topics we might explore include: project management, software development tools, resource management, transportation safety models, and the use of new tools such as ChatGPT. Our goal will be to present bite-sized insights that you can use and apply to your projects.

If you’re interested in exploring this topic further, check out this white paper on how to develop better estimates for large-scale, transportation-related software projects. There’s a wealth of information included here about how to produce better software development estimates and how to effectively manage software projects in the government transportation space.

If you have any ideas or suggestions for topics you would like the Software PM Experts to cover, or areas that you feel are challenging for software development in the government space, or questions— please let us know.