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If your team is not focused on delivering intermediate project milestones, they are missing what’s really of value. It’s easy to miss the forest for the trees if you’re only focusing on task-level points estimates and velocity tracking. I’ve become frustrated with how burn charts focus on showing progress through an entire backlog and don’t…
For 10 years, I thought I was a very good project manager. By very good, I mean that almost all of the projects I led were delivered near scope and on schedule. There were no death marches of overtime, and we pushed the technology envelope. Overall, we enjoyed the work. It was not without its…
When did you last prune your backlog? When you started the project, the team sat together for a planning poker session to provide the initial definition of the project. Now it’s six months later – or six weeks or even days later. You’ve been paying attention to the stories in your current iteration. Have you…
Using story points to estimate how long a project will take works really great. One of the issues with using story points is that it’s very tempting to directly relate them to hours — like saying a point is worth four hours. This is because there exists a need to estimate development velocity of projects…
At Atomic, burn charts are an important component of our project management practices. A Burn chart is a high-level visual indicator that reveals project progress over time. Generating these charts at regular intervals provides key insights for both the business customer and the development team. Some of these insights include: Confidence about delivery dates Confidence…
A couple of years ago I wrote about how I was using Epic stories for early project estimations. Recently John Rusk posted a question in the comments: I have a question about this: “We make no attempt to restrict that the total number of points from the resulting stories adds up to the previous estimate…
In our three-dimensional world, our angle of approach to an object can greatly influence our perception. Take houses, for example. Some look small from the street but are larger than they first appear due to their hidden depth. In the same way, our perception of problems and their solutions in software development and design are…
Many times during the sales process we are asked to give a cost estimation based on our early understanding of an application’s core features. In order to responsibly and efficiently estimate, we conduct a range analysis. We use this technique because we want to establish a responsible middle ground between our optimistic and pessimistic estimates….
Part of a series on Making better estimates. Estimates require making assumptions. Assumptions violated are like risks realized. Both can be accounted for with some estimate buffering.
Part of a series on Making better estimates. Probably the simplest way of improving your project estimates is to explicitly de-couple duration from calendar. It’s easy to become so involved with estimating the duration of tasks that you forget to account for the actual work calendar. Date vs duration On a small time scale, estimating…
Carl is the president and co-founder of Atomic Object