Everyone In On Estimates

Bart has been in ecommerce for over 20 years, and can't imagine a better job to have. He is interested in all things agile, or anything new to learn.

  Agile   Decision Making   Estimating   Leadership   Scrum   Talent Management   Teams   ProjectsAtWork  

Establishing a small "brain trust" to develop project estimates might seem like a reasonable way to optimize resources, but it goes against three closely held Agile principles. Worse, it will likely lead to less accurate estimates, while disengaging the team and undermining value.

In the first article of this series, we introduced the concept of anti-patterns in agile project management; that is, common solutions to common problems that rarely or never work. Since then we have described 11 such agile anti-patterns; links to each article in the series can be found at the end of this latest installment. The resulting reader comments show many people are recognizing their own projects and teams in this series. Discovering that our peers have experienced similar issues can be a turning point on the way to Agile success.

Agile Anti-Pattern #12: Establishing an Estimator-in-Chief

In many organizations, and in particular those that use a more traditional model of project organization, a new project begins with a small team consisting of a business or product owner, a project manager, and a senior technical person — an architect, a manager, or maybe a software developer who has been around for a long time. These three folks collaborate to perform all the project initiation activities, including determining the requirements, creating the solution design, making the project …

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