What a tangled effort estimation web we weave! How can knowledge management disentangle this web?

A cornerstone of software project management is effort estimation, the process by which effort is forecasted and used as basis to predict costs and allocate resources effectively, so enabling projects to be delivered on time and within budget. Effort estimation is a very complex domain where the relationship between factors is non-deterministic and has an inherently uncertain nature, and where corresponding decisions and predictions require reasoning with uncertainty. This lecture will provide an overview of the field of project management, focusing on Effort Estimation, discuss previous work in this area, and detail a way in which the use of knowledge management techniques can effectively help Information Technology Organisations improve their effort forecasting.