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No more initial estimates? NOOOOOOOOOOO!

Kiron Bondale

You are assigned to manage a project and before you or your team have had an opportunity to start to chip away at the looming mountain of uncertainty, you get put on the spot to provide a cost or schedule estimate by your project sponsor or some other stakeholder. Sometimes we see an oscillation between these outcomes. No be there.

Estimate 136
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How to Manage Fixed Date Projects

Rebel’s Guide to PM

Work out the end date ignoring the fixed delivery date, even if you do have to crash your analysis time into a shorter period and use estimates with a greater degree of uncertainty than normal. Backing in is when you start at the end of the project and work your way backwards calculating task estimates until you reach today.

Telecoms 476
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Basis of Estimating Software Development

Herding Cats

The estimating of software development is both straightforward and complex. When it is suggested that estimating is hard, of no value, and unnecessary, always ask what principle is used to support that claim? Software Sizing and Estimating: Mk II FPA , Charles Symons, John Wiley & Sons, 1991. Don't hear one?

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How We Made Our Customer The Product Owner

Scrum.org

From 2010–2015 I worked as a Scrum Master for a web agency. Estimate the Product Backlog together. At the end of the session, we would make a rough estimation: “With the knowledge, we have at this point in time, we think it will take us somewhere between 5–7 Sprints”. We developed software solutions for external clients.

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Estimating the Risk

Herding Cats

In order to make risk-informed decisions, we must estimate the outcomes and the impacts of those outcomes on future activities (cost, schedule, and technical performance of products and services). Without these estimates, there is no risk management. Without these estimates, there can be no risk management.

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Strategic Project Portfolio Management [Book Review]

Rebel’s Guide to PM

Estimating For Success. Maybe best of all, Moore talks about range-based estimates – a topic I’m very interested in. Moore explains that estimates are biased towards the initial values because people don’t adjust their estimates again after making that initial decision.

PMO 150
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Entering Actuals During the Tracking Cycle

MPUG

The tracking process is not as trivial as marking a task complete as planned or using simple percent complete estimates. Uyttewaal (2010) provides a thorough discussion. Chapter 11 in Forecast Scheduling with Microsoft Project 2010. ProjectPro, 2010. Figure 2c: Use a Baseline Table to see the Baseline Schedule.

2010 52