Late product or project delivery. Budget overruns. Burned out staff. Compromised customer relationships. Missed market opportunities. What do these critical problems have in common?
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Most software development organizations suffer from them |
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They all have the same root cause |
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They’re avoidable |
How can these challenges be answered, or better yet, never emerge at all? Reliable project estimates.
Most organizations don’t create accurate project estimates; they’re perceived as a difficult but necessary activity. The reality is that estimates are only hard to do when you aren’t equipped with the right techniques and practices.
A well crafted estimate creates alignment between business objectives and technical estimates, leads to more informed business decision making, reliable project delivery dates, controlled project costs, and satisfied customers. For the business this can translate into enhanced market competitiveness.
We invite you to learn how your software development organization can substantially improve its project estimation capabilities and deliver more business value.
How to Get Better at Estimation
Solving the project estimation challenge in a sensible, straightforward manner is the mark of the SPC approach. Instead of a “one-size-fits-all” design that most consulting firms utilize, our consulting, coaching and mentoring services work in context with our clients’ culture and experience. Most importantly, we carefully analyze the most pressing needs that need to be answered to ensure a high value, high impact experience:
Fit estimation into the overall development process
The first step in any improvement strategy is understanding where you are. We work with you to map out your current development process and identify the points in this process where estimation reasonably fits to provide maximum benefit.
Design an estimation procedure to fit your culture
A standard estimation procedure is key to your ability to create reasonable estimates in a repeatable fashion across the organization. With an understanding of your process, methodologies and capabilities, we help you tailor your existing estimation procedure to adequately address your needs, or to create one from scratch.
Mine historical information to tune your estimation engine
If you have existing historical information from past projects, great! We help you determine what the best representative data can be for you to get started. However, many organizations have no baseline project data. We help you mine for data to start from historical records, and at the very least, work with you to ensure that the proper data is captured from projects in progress to provide the necessary information for future initiatives.
Apply specific estimation techniques
We work with individuals or teams to practice applying specific estimation techniques. Understanding where the various techniques fit in the overall process lifecycle and the pros and cons of each is key to identifying those techniques that make up your standard estimation procedure.
Adjusting Project Scope to Available Budget and Resources
Successful projects are do-able from the outset. Use our knowledge and insights to develop a realistic trade-off analysis of project scope versus budget and resources. Your budget and resource constraints will be captured permitting a thorough understanding of the implications of high versus low project estimates. A comprehensive report on an estimate for the scoped project will provide a baseline process for future project planning.
Practical Project Planning
If you have a need for clear project direction and definition for all stakeholders we can bring that to your project. You will gain predictability and repeatability through mastering The Dynamic Project Plan. The process we guide you through addresses; Critical path/scheduling, the Work Breakdown Structure, Resource levelling, and Relationships, dependencies and assumptions. By Creating a defined and agreed project baseline, this will give you the basis for managing change and communicating the impact of changes. In addition we will share our insights on smart approaches to; quantifying and evaluating tradeoffs, risk planning and mitigation, and the role of Project life-cycle selection.
Establishing and nurturing sound estimation practices is the first step to consistently generating reliable estimates. By working with SPC, you can easily create clear, simple and powerful processes and develop the required skills to answer your estimation challenges with confidence. These improved estimation practices will fundamentally change your business for the better.
