In this post, I explained that SCRUM is not a silver bullet and that there some significant barriers to entry for organizations wanting to adopt SCRUM. In this post, I’m going to introduce Agile estimating, planning poker, fibonacci, and velocity.
Let’s say that your organization is ready to go, you’ve turned command and control on it’s ear, [...] Read more »

In this last article of the series, I’ll cover a potpourri of other estimating topics including dealing with poorly defined work and what to do when management thinks it should cost less or take less time.

Dealing with Poorly Defined Work
In order to introduce the basic concepts of effort estimating, we limited our discussion to [...] Read more »

This is the penultimate article in a series of five on effort estimating. In the first, I focused on definitions since many people use terms such as estimate and budget as synonyms when, in fact, they are very different. Here is a brief recap of some key definitions:
Estimate. An informed assessment of an uncertain event. [...] Read more »

Preparing Three-Point Range Estimates
The mechanics of preparing three-point range estimates, particularly if you are working with team members who have never used the technique before, are important. And just a reminder: we are still dealing with effort estimates; duration estimates come later.

Working one-on-one. Let’s again start with a simple case where you need an effort [...] Read more »

This is the second in a series of articles on estimating effort. In the first, I focused on definitions since I find that many people use terms such as estimate and budget as synonyms when, in fact, they are very different. Here is a brief recap of the key definitions that I will use:
Estimate. An [...] Read more »

This series of articles is extracted from a similar series I wrote for Projects@Work a couple of years ago. I’m posting it here in reaction to my review of Josh’s articles on Earned Value where he (in my opinion) used the term “estimate” when he should have said  ”budget.” Many of the terms related [...] Read more »