Comments on: Estimation Depends On…

By: Lea

Lea — Thu, 21 May 2009 06:27:27 +0000

I’m a Project Manager and I use a very nice estimating tool that is in the market today which is CostXpert. I use the results I get from this software as a guide on how long and how much a new project would cost. And then we use Agile as our methodology. So far after using it for almost 2 years, together with Agile, most of my projects are on time (Well for my company’s part. Delays due to the customers are another story.). Hope this helps.

By: johanna

johanna — Tue, 19 May 2009 20:07:37 +0000

Yes, Joe, your examples are non-functional requirements.

By: Joe Grossberg

Joe Grossberg — Tue, 19 May 2009 18:23:05 +0000

Can you clarify what you mean by “non-functional requirements”?

Stuff like “it should have a clean design” and “it should be secure”?

By: Jim Ward

Jim Ward — Tue, 19 May 2009 18:07:33 +0000

As Yogi Berra said, “It’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future.” Estimates are just that, predictions about the future. They will be based largely on assumptions. To change our approach to estimating we must first change our assumptions about the future. I am not surprised that this is difficult to do in an in house training session. If you took people off site and took away their cellphone, blackberry, email access during the course you might more closely match the results of a public course.

We are good at estimating what we know and not very good at estimating what we don’t know. If the project life cycle, the project organization, etc., allow us to know more, then they will make our estimating easier and our estimates more useful.

As you have pointed out elsewhere, estimating is useless without timely feedback on actual performance against estimates and appropriate adjustments when actual performance does not match estimates.

A fascinating topic.

By: Dwayne Phillips

Dwayne Phillips — Tue, 19 May 2009 11:15:44 +0000

I was in a course last week on proposal writing. Several people were in and out, in and out, in and out because they were (you guessed it) writing a proposal. Much of the class was about being organized and disciplined so that you could write a better proposal in less time without so much in and out in and out.

By: The Jaywalker

The Jaywalker — Tue, 19 May 2009 07:12:47 +0000

Any chances of getting a glimpse of your slides or training material?