The Value of an Estimate

Despite the diversity of stakeholders in the built environment sector—from contractors to lenders to real estate investors—they all rely on one thing: estimates.

David Alexander is teaching students in Northwestern Engineering's Master of Science in Project Management (MPM) program how to better understand estimates and wield the power that comes with them. 

David, a senior vice president at commercial construction and contracting company F.H. Paschen, co-teaches Building Construction Estimating. Early in 2026, he joined MPM and helped revamp the course before offering it in the spring. His message to students about the course’s importance to their future was clear.

“Every stakeholder in the built environment is going to be exposed to estimates,” David said. “They're going to create estimates. They're going to be analyzing estimates. Change orders are estimates. Estimates really are the basis for everything that goes on in the built environment.”

With that in mind, David and co-instructor Daniel Pomfrett emphasized that students need to understand what estimating is, what it means, and how it impacts their work.

The course previously focused more heavily on estimating for construction, but recognizing that many MPM graduates end up outside the contractor’s space, David and Daniel widened the course’s lens. The focus shifted from training students to become estimators to developing a broader understanding of estimating fundamentals.

To do that, David and Daniel relied on their own professional experiences, as well as the perspectives from an array of built environment stakeholders, including contractors, subcontractors, developers, architects, and engineers.

“A lot of our students are going to be in other places in the built environment sector,” David said. “They're not going to be estimators, and they don't need to be estimators. But they need to understand why estimating is important for all the various stakeholders.” 

David is well-versed in this lesson. He has nearly four decades of experience in the built environment sector with some major Chicago-area projects under his belt, including Aqua (an 82-story skyscraper), The St. Regis (the third-tallest building in Chicago at 101 stories), the United Center (home to the Chicago Bulls and Chicago Blackhawks), and 2 Prudential (a 64-story building located in the Loop area of downtown Chicago).

To help drive home the lessons of their in-class lectures, David and Daniel assigned each student to a different role in the industry. Some were asked to be developers, while others were general contractors, subcontractors, and architects. They were then given a scenario with a project that was over budget and asked to negotiate an agreement—from their role's perspective—to get the project back on track. 

David was struck by the realism in the students’ responses 

"It was amazing to me how quickly the students started acting in the capacity of industry stakeholders, and by that I mean acting only in their own entity's best interest and not taking into account what was best for the project or the other stakeholders," he said. "This is a critical issue in the built environment and one that has far reaching impacts to the industry as a whole. 

That live-action scenario allowed students to see for themselves the struggles of estimating when each stakeholder comes to the table with a different motivation. It also showed the potential impact of effective communication in bringing different perspectives together for collaboration 

David's goal when he started teaching the course was to raise awareness about estimating and its potential to either unite or divide collaborators on a project.

Based on student feedback, that goal was reached 

“What we wanted to do is teach an understanding of different perspectives on why estimating is important and how it's used," he said. "We asked the students what they got out of it and what they thought would be different for them going forward, and from what we heard, we accomplished the goal.”