According to Mike Cohn in his book, Agile Estimating and Planning, Ideal Time is "...the amount of time that something takes when stripped of all peripheral activities," and Elapsed Time is "...the amount of time that passes on a clock..."
Is there a more simple way to explain this?
How have YOU explained it (or similar concepts such as Effort and Duration) to stakeholders and project team members?
What has their response been? Saving Changes...
Paul ParkerScrumMaster (CSM)| PricewaterhouseCoopers (formally BearingPoint)Tampa, Fl, United States
Aaron,
This is one area that I try to avoid. Instead of looking at Ideal Time and Duration look at it from a capacity view.
When I go over estimates I explain to the client that the average fulltime project team member is productive about 6 hours on the project each day. I explain that admin, training, email, etc. that is not directly tied to project task take up the remainder of the day. So in a given week each team member is allocated for 30 hours and for the sprint 120 hours. So if a task is 12 hours it will take 2 days (given that we determined that each member works 6 hours a day on the project.)
Saving Changes...
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