Refine Your Estimation Practices With Top-Down Allocations
Don’t let bad estimates ruin good work.
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Bad project estimates:
- Cause overruns that compound budgeting problems.
- Shrink scope, diminish quality, increase costs, and decrease customer satisfaction.
- Damage employee engagement and confidence in their capabilities.
Improving your estimation practices:
- Boosts team morale and improves product throughput.
- Provides clarity to project sponsors and allows for negotiations and discussions around project requests.
- Helps contain the impacts of risks and issues without damaging the rest of the portfolio.
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Onsite Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn’t enough, we offer low-cost onsite delivery of our Project Workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a road map in place to complete your project successfully.
Book NowModule 1: Develop the Foundations of Organizational Memory
The Purpose
- Track key performance indicators on past projects to inform goals for future projects.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Developed Project History List.
- Refined starting estimates that can be adjusted accurately from project to project.
| Activities: | Outputs: | |
|---|---|---|
| 1.1 | Build project history. |
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| 1.2 | Analyze estimation capabilities. |
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| 1.3 | Identify estimation goals. |
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Module 2: Define a Requirements Gathering Process
The Purpose
- Outline the common attributes required to complete projects.
- Identify the commonly forgotten attributes to ensure comprehensive scoping early on.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Refined initial estimate based on high-level insights into work required and resources available.
| Activities: | Outputs: | |
|---|---|---|
| 2.1 | Develop a list of in-scope project attributes. |
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| 2.2 | Identify leadership priorities for deliverables and attributes. |
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| 2.3 | Track team and skill responsibilities for attributes. |
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Module 3: Build an Estimation Process
The Purpose
- Set clear processes for tracking the health of your estimate to ensure it is always as accurate as possible.
- Define check-in points to evaluate risks and challenges to the project and identify trigger conditions.
Key Benefits Achieved
- An estimation process rooted in organizational memory and lessons learned.
- Project estimates that are consistently reevaluated to predict and correct challenges before they can drastically affect your projects.
| Activities: | Outputs: | |
|---|---|---|
| 3.1 | Determine Milestone Check-In Points. |
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| 3.2 | Develop Lessons Learned Meeting Agendas. |
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| 3.3 | Identify common risks and past lessons learned. |
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| 3.4 | Develop contingency tracking capabilities. |
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Module 4: Improve Business Alignment With Your Estimation Plan
The Purpose
- Bridge the gap between death march projects and bloated and uncertain estimates by communicating expectations and assumptions clearly to your sponsors.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Clear estimation criteria and assumptions aligned with business priorities.
- Post-mortem discussion items crucial to improving project history knowledge for next time.
| Activities: | Outputs: | |
|---|---|---|
| 4.1 | Identify leadership risk priorities. |
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| 4.2 | Develop IT business alignment. |
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| 4.3 | Develop hand-off procedures and milestone approval methods. |
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| 4.4 | Create a list of post-mortem priorities. |
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