Managing Technology-Based Projects: Tools, Techniques, People and Business Processes

Chapter 11

Resource Estimating and Budgeting

AT GOOGLE, TECHNOLOGY PROJECTS ARE DONE ON A RAPID SCHEDULE.

Since its start-up days in 1995 at Susan Wojcicki's garage in Menlo park, and founding as a company in 1998, Google has grown enormously. Today, a $50 billion company, Google offers dozens of products from search engines to Gmail and Maps, and keeps continuously searching for new products and better ways to leverage technology. “Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for you to find the information you need and get the things you need to do done,” says Larry Page, Google's co-founder and CEO. “We pride ourselves on our ability to develop and launch new products and features at a very fast pace. This is made possible in part by our world-class engineers, but our approach to software development enables us to balance speed and quality, and is integral to our success. Our obsession for speed and scale is evident in our developer infrastructure and tools. Developers across the world continually write, build, test and release code in multiple programming languages like C++, Java, Python, Javascript and others, and our Engineering Tools Team, for example, is challenged to keep this development ecosystem running smoothly. We share technical knowledge and the lessons learned along the way.”

At Google most projects have time horizons of just 6 to 12 months. The aim is to deliver ...