Once upon a time, I was searching for some solid guidelines on cost estimation to improve the way my contract was doing it.
I found a few great resources
Category Archives: Estimation
Once Bitten, Twice Shy
“Mark, I expect you to perform at the level you committed to. There is no excuse for this, you are making our entire project team look bad. Your tasks were nowhere near the critical path before, but now you ARE the critical path.”
Chaos and SCRUM
Josh asked me to write about some of the challenges and obstacles that we face in our environment. In order to do that I should explain a little about that environment.
Over the past 36 months we have transformed ourselves…
Estimating Effort: Part 5
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 […]
Estimating Effort: Part 4
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 […]
Estimating Effort: Part 3
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 […]
Estimating Effort: Part 2
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. […]
Estimating Effort: Part 1
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 to […]