I’ll get this out of the way quickly — there is no such thing as a typical GSA implementation.

With that said, I have been involved in scoping and delivering around 250 GSA implementations, and some averages and trends have emerged.  Most projects involve the same five core phases: Design and Requirements, Hardware and Security, Content Acquisition, User Interface, and Testing and Deployment.  I will walk through how we estimate the duration of these phases, with the understanding that we always do a thorough scoping workshop with a customer to refine this timeline.  Thanks to our large volume of projects, our estimates have gotten very accurate.  While certain tasks might not always be completed in the order we predict, the overall effort is usually correct.