If you were unable to attend "Building an Estimation Center of Excellence," the webinar replay and slides are now available. Here are the Q&A highlights:

How do you handle estimating change requests (scope creep). Do you estimate the entire project again, or do you just estimate the impact of the change requests?

It would depend on where we were in the project lifecycle. If we were still fairly early on (somewhere between the feasibility assessment and the refined estimate), I would add those into my sizing assumptions and re-estimate the project. If I'm already farther along and I get changes when I'm already constructing the system, then I would use my adaptive forecasting and add those in within the context of everything else I have to build as part of the deliverable release. This is because the impact will be bigger if we're farther along and we already have everything integrated and we're into testing versus earlier on when not a lot has been constructed. QSM's forecasting capabilities will be able to tell us the impact on schedule and cost.

Should the center of excellence estimate all projects regardless of size, or if the project is small, then have the project teams estimate it?

On Thursday, June 13, at 1:00 PM EDT, Larry Putnam, Jr. will present Building an Estimation Center of Excellence.

The pressure to succeed in software development is higher than ever - the current economic climate demands we do more with less, there is fierce global and domestic competition, time-to-market expectations are high, and your company's reputation is on the line. When projects fail, the failure to meet expectations is more often an estimation or business decision failure than a production or execution issue. In this webinar, industry expert Larry Putnam, Jr. takes you through the key elements and step-by-step process for setting up an estimation center of excellence that will ensure your projects succeed.

Larry Putnam, Jr. has 25 years of experience using the Putnam-SLIM Methodology. He has participated in hundreds of estimation and oversight service engagements, and is responsible for product management of the SLIM Suite of software measurement tools and customer care programs. Since becoming Co-CEO, Larry has built QSM's capabilities in sales, customer support, product requirements and most recently in creating a world class consulting organization. Larry has delivered numerous speeches at conferences on software estimation and measurement, and has trained - over a five-year period - more than 1,000 software professionals on industry best practice measurement, estimation and control techniques and in the use of the SLIM Suite.

Watch the replay!

We are pleased to announce the the latest update to the QSM Project Database! The 8th edition of this database includes more than 10,000 completed real-time, engineering and IT projects from 19 different industry sectors.

The QSM Database is the cornerstone of our business. We leverage this project intelligence to keep our products current with the latest tools and methods, to support our consulting services, to inform our customers as they move into new areas, and to develop better predictive algorithms. It ensures that the SLIM Suite of tools is providing customers with the best intelligence to identify and mitigate risk and efficiently estimate project scope, leading to projects that are delivered on-time and on-budget. In addition, the database supports our benchmarking services, allowing QSM clients to quickly see how they compare with the latest industry trends.

To learn more about the project data included in our latest update, visit the QSM Database page.

Software projects devote enormous amounts of time and money to quality assurance. It's a difficult task, considering most QA work is remedial in nature - it can correct problems that arise long before the requirements are complete or the first line of code has been written, but has little chance of preventing defects from being created in the first place. By the time the first bugs are discovered, many projects are already locked into a fixed scope, staffing, and schedule that do not account for the complex and nonlinear relationships between size, effort, and defects. 

At this point, these projects are doomed to fail, but disasters like these can be avoided. When armed with the right information, managers can graphically demonstrate the tradeoffs between time to market, cost, and quality, and negotiate achievable deadlines and budgets that reflect their management goals. 

Leveraging historical data from the QSM Database, QSM Research Director Kate Armel equips professionals with a replicable, data-driven framework for future project decision-making in an article recently published in Software Quality Professional. 

Read the full article here.

We are pleased to announce QSM's partnership with Digital Celerity LLC, a leader in Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) and IT Service Management expert services and solutions, for CA World 2013. 

At the event, representatives from both QSM and Digital Celerity will showcase how QSM's SLIM Suite of Tools feeds project estimation data into the CA Clarity^TM PPM tool to allow for improved planning and resource allocation. Out of the top 10 systems integrators in the world, seven rely on SLIM intelligence. By engaging in this type of top-down estimating, analytics for project planning can be fed into PPM tools such as CA Clarity^TM PPM. Resulting analytics include detailed plans for effort by labor category, time period and project size. Leveraging SLIM tools with CA Clarity^TM PPM pushes project risk identification to the earlier proposal and feasibility stages in the project lifecycle, which can significantly reduce the risk of project failure. 

The conference, which takes place April 21-24, 2013 in Las Vegas, NV, will showcase the latest and most innovative technologies for delivering optimal business results. Stop by QSM booth #115 to learn more about how SLIM enhances PPM tools.

For more details about this partnership, read the full press release.

If you were unable to attend our recent webinar, Using Benchmarking to Quantify the Benefits of Process Improvement, a replay is now available.

With increasing pressure to improve quality while cutting costs, process improvement is a top priority for many organizations right now; but once we've implemented a process improvement initiative, how do we accurately measure the benefits? Benchmarking is critical to determining the success of any serious process improvement program. As with any type of measurement program, it requires an initial reference point to measure progress. To set our point of comparison, we first need to perform a benchmark on a contemporary sample of projects that are representative of the typical work that we do. In this webinar, industry expert Larry Putnam, Jr. will take you through the necessary steps to perform a successful benchmark - from collecting quantitative and qualitative data to establish the initial baseline benchmark all the way through to performing follow up benchmarks on new projects and process improvement analysis.

Larry Putnam, Jr. has 25 years of experience using the Putnam-SLIM Methodology. He has participated in hundreds of estimation and oversight service engagements, and is responsible for product management of the SLIM Suite of software measurement tools and customer care programs.

Watch the webinar replay!

On Thursday, Feb. 7, at 1:00 PM EST, Larry Putnam, Jr. will present Using Benchmarking to Quantify the Benefits of Process Improvement.

With increasing pressure to improve quality while cutting costs, process improvement is a top priority for many organizations right now; but once we've implemented a process improvement initiative, how do we accurately measure the benefits? Benchmarking is critical to determining the success of any serious process improvement program. As with any type of measurement program, it requires an initial reference point to measure progress. To set our point of comparison, we first need to perform a benchmark on a contemporary sample of projects that are representative of the typical work that we do. In this webinar, industry expert Larry Putnam, Jr. will take you through the necessary steps to perform a successful benchmark - from collecting quantitative and qualitative data to establish the initial baseline benchmark all the way through to performing follow up benchmarks on new projects and process improvement analysis.

Larry Putnam, Jr. has 25 years of experience using the Putnam-SLIM Methodology. He has participated in hundreds of estimation and oversight service engagements, and is responsible for product management of the SLIM Suite of software measurement tools and customer care programs. Since becoming Co-CEO, Larry has built QSM's capabilities in sales, customer support, product requirements and most recently in creating a world class consulting organization. Larry has delivered numerous speeches at conferences on software estimation and measurement, and has trained - over a five-year period - more than 1,000 software professionals on industry best practice measurement, estimation and control techniques and in the use of the SLIM Suite.

QSM's best in class consulting team continues to grow with talented and dedicated individuals. We are pleased to welcome Abyi Yeshigeta as a Project Consultant supporting the Department of State Consular Affairs (CA) Consular Systems Technology (CST) engagement team on-site in Washington, DC. Abyi holds a BBA in Business Management from James Madison University and is a PMI certified Project Management Professional (PMP) with DoD Defense Acquisition University training (DAU 101). Abyi brings five years of management consulting experience to include program and project management support, test and evaluation, and independent reviews/audits.

Experienced consultants like Abyi allow us to understand your business challenges quickly and identify effective solutions. Learn more about QSM consulting services today!

Last Thursday, I hosted a webinar introducing our new, cloud-based estimation tool, SLIM-WebServices (watch the replay here). The Q&A portion of the presentation, which was fielded by both Larry Putnam, Jr. and myself, featured some great questions from the audience about the new tool's capabilities. Here are the highlights:

How will this work with the desktop version? Do they work together or separately?

Either way. The web version comes with enough information to work as a standalone. If you want more configuration capability, then you’ll want to have the desktop products and you can have a power user creating templates for the web version.

How do I use SLIM-WebServices if I don’t have the desktop tools?

You can have QSM create the templates for you on a consulting basis if you don’t have the desktop tools. SLIM-WebServices also includes standard templates representing multiple lifecycles that you can download very easily. However, any customization would need to be done with the desktop tools or with QSM Consulting.

Can we have a company-specific estimation database so that users can select from previous estimates?

On Thursday, Nov. 8 at 1:00 PM EST, I will present SLIM-WebServices: Project Estimation Goes Global - a webinar showcasing our new, web-based estimation and measurement tool. I'm looking forward to demonstrating how this powerful, yet easy-to-use tool can be leveraged by both non-technical users and estimation experts alike to share project estimation intelligence across the entire enterprise.

For too long, project estimation intelligence has been confined to a niche group, making it difficult for business stakeholders and decision makers to get critical project planning information when they need it. Introducing SLIM-WebServices from QSM - the lighter, leaner, liberated way to share the power of SLIM with an entire enterprise. With this new cloud-based tool, we are empowering more people in more positions at more places in an enterprise - improving visibility, transparency and informed decision making. Ultimately, this is an organization's best defense against cost overruns, schedule slippages, and failed implementations. Presented by QSM Marketing Manager, Elisabeth Pendergrass, this webinar gives an overview and live demonstration of SLIM-WebServices. 

As Marketing Manager at QSM, Elisabeth Pendergrass has over 7 years of experience working in software and technology marketing. Her responsibilities at QSM include website and search engine marketing, organizing in-house and joint webinars, social media, creating marketing materials for new product offerings, and managing PR efforts. 

Register now for this webinar!