Project effort or schedule estimation is an important task in software project management. Selecting a suitable estimation plan to match the project features lies in the hand of the project leaders. In order to reduce the costs, software effort estimation is inevitable. Global software development (GSD) is the environment for developing projects at geographically isolated areas beyond cultural peripheries in a harmonized vogue comprising synchronous and asynchronous communication. The conventional methods are utilized to estimate effort for co-located projects which are not efficient for GSD-projects. The conventional methods are utilized to estimate effort which is not resourceful for software development projects. In this research, proposed a model for estimating the effort of both co-located and software development projects based on their intellectual difference and distance. For effort estimation proposed approach classifies two methods like model based method and expert based method. Since effort estimation lack of performance effectiveness in this research uses COSEEKMO toolkit for improving mean error.