What Undermines Accurate Project Estimation: Part 1

When planning a new composable project, it’s easy to get swept up in exciting ideas like AI chatbots or other flashy features. These creative aspirations are fantastic and we at Aries love building custom tools for our clients. But what makes these innovations truly impactful is a strong foundation. When the fundamentals are dialed in, businesses gain advantages over competitors who overlook them with smoother launches and digital platforms that actually deliver on their strategic goals and set the stage for future iterations.

Aries Solutions’ experience delivering digital transformations has taught us what often slips through the cracks, and how to avoid costly surprises down the road. This two-part list highlights commonly forgotten elements that are critical to a successful project; including these from the start helps ensure more accurate project estimation.

It’s important to have a clear and well-communicated understanding of a project’s goals beyond simply completing the work. Replatforming or launching a new system shouldn’t be seen as the one and only end goal; there should be specific business value drivers, like cost savings or improved personalization, that guide decision-making throughout the project. If these objectives aren’t clearly shared across the organization – from executives to architects and product managers – teams may end up building solutions that don’t fully support the broader business vision, leading to extra work later. Without aligning every stage of development to the project’s true purpose, organizations risk reaching the end of a project and realizing they haven’t actually met their strategic goals. We don’t want your project to just “go live.” We want your project to directly and positively contribute to the reasons the project was undertaken in the first place.

During project estimation and pre-launch testing, people often focus only on what’s visually apparent – the “happy path” of clicking through pages and completing basic flows like checkout. However, many critical, non-visible components of a website are overlooked, such as background processes and underlying functionality that ensure everything runs smoothly. These background items are frequently neglected, even though they are just as or more impactful. We’ve seen projects that look great on the surface but falter after launch because background tasks were underestimated.

Beyond ensuring tags are firing and data is reported correctly, businesses must also navigate cookie laws and privacy regulations. Issues like cookies being set before user consent can lead to significant legal risks. These types of problems often go unnoticed because they aren’t immediately visible, yet they’re essential to test and address to prevent compliance issues down the road. It’s important to have a development team with experience in common tag management solutions and a QA team ready to validate the work.

Considering SEO metadata and sitemaps during project estimation is essential because they impact both user experience and a website’s long-term visibility. Elements like page titles, meta descriptions, structured data, and both XML and HTML sitemaps are often overlooked in early planning, yet they require strategic content creation and technical implementation, especially for large or dynamic sites. XML sitemaps help search engines crawl and index content efficiently, while HTML sitemaps improve on-site navigation for users. Failing to include these elements from the project estimation stage can result in rushed or incomplete optimization later, ultimately affecting search rankings and engagement. By factoring them in early, teams ensure the site is discoverable and optimized from Launch Day One.

Even if a 404 page is tested, it can still fail in unexpected ways. For example, if your 404 page depends on a vendor to render your header and footer, and that vendor experiences downtime, the error page will fail as well. Error pages shouldn’t just exist; they must be fully functional even in the rare case your core services are down. Errors need to be gracefully handled across every layer of the solution, whether a CDN issue or JavaScript coding errors, these problems should be minimized and ideally not impact the customer experience.

Properly managing logging levels is another consideration. Because logging is extremely common during development, it can become costly in production, particularly with services like Datadog that charge based on log volume. Developers often overuse Console.log, but logging should be more structured using levels like Info, Warn, Error, and Debug. Different environments should have appropriate settings: full logging in Development, limited logging in Staging, and only critical logging like errors and warnings in Production. This approach controls costs, protects sensitive data like keys or PII customer information, and improves clarity and system performance.

Third-party integrations introduce uncertainty in project planning due to unpredictable API documentation and limited visibility into external systems. Issues like outdated docs, authentication problems, and unreliable test environments can cause delays. When multiple third-party services are involved, the risks and complexity only increase.

Once the integration begins, maintaining consistent communication – such as weekly Standup working sessions – has proven to be one of the most effective ways to navigate integration challenges. This proactive engagement becomes essential when estimates based on surface-level information meet the reality of complex technical execution.

Estimating well isn’t about limiting vision, it’s about enabling it. When foundational elements are addressed early, projects stay on track, on budget, and on strategy. At Aries Solutions, we balance bold creativity with composable commerce expertise to deliver practical platforms that grow with your business.

While you’re waiting for Part 2, reach out and see how our experienced team can help you with an accurate project estimation to build a smarter, stronger digital foundation from day one.