Estimation Effort
Why such a fuss, in our company the manager does it before the lunch break!
The heroic approach, according to which the best employee should provide an estimate, is widespread. But how good is your hero/ heroine?
Perhaps it helps to interview several such heroes? But what happens when everyone else follows the lead hero? What to do against Groupthink? The problem has been solved for some time: with the Delphi method, also known as Planning Poker.
How do you limit the estimation effort?
The estimates themselves should always be budgeted or limited in time. Otherwise, once the engineers are in the discussion, the effort for an estimate quickly becomes immeasurable. Time timers or egg timers, for example, are suitable for time limitation.
When budgeting estimates (the estimation of the estimation effort), you should use realistic values, because for really large projects the estimation effort is also correspondingly high. For a large project, Solcept invests about 1% of the project effort in estimation.
The investment is worthwhile because fewer estimation errors allow more accurate, efficient planning and correction measures can be initiated at an early stage. For example, a product with a smaller feature set can be planned early if it is seen that the development of the entire product range is taking too long.
In addition, the effort for project management is reduced, because the project estimation provides all information for the first planning step with the WBS and the risk table. For example, by transferring the Work Breakdown Structure with all information into a Backlog, which can even be done automatically.