Quantifying software project risk and having a systematic way of accounting for it in software estimates helps firms determine how much contingency (or management reserve) is needed to protect against factors like scope growth, lower than anticipated productivity, or technical challenges that keep teams from executing project plans as originally intended.  When risk mitigation is an explicit part of the software estimate, we can set reasonable client and management expectations and negotiate practical project plans with a higher likelihood of success.

Dealing with Uncertainty

At the time most software estimates are performed, detailed design is incomplete and major decisions about how the system will be designed, coded, tested, and delivered have not yet been made.  Faced with imperfect information, estimators must supply educated guesses – hopefully based on sound requirements and performance data from completed projects - about the final delivered size, productivity, team size, and schedule.  Because the inputs to the estimate are uncertain, the final outcomes are also uncertain.

When we estimate that a project will most likely take 6 months and 8 full-time staff to execute, we really should say, “Based on our analysis and past performance data, we expect the project to take 6 months and use 8 people, but the schedule could vary by as much as 15% and the budget by up to 20%.” But all too often, clients and management expect “single point” estimates based more on optimism than careful risk analysis.

If you were unable to attend our recent webinar, "Making Better IT Cost & Scope Decisions with Top-Down Estimation," a replay is now available.

This year thousands of software, cloud migration, and IT development managers will spend long hours developing very detailed, bottom-up plans. Unfortunately, many of these plans will be unreliable, because they don't take into account the big picture. Generating top-down estimates, before detailed planning occurs, allow managers to see the overall development and delivery targets for cost and scope. This allows for managing project expectations and even negotiation before work gets underway.

This presentation includes a Q&A session with the audience and covers such topics as:

• How to generate top-down estimates early in the decision-making process
• Best practices for IT estimation
• How to leverage historical data to improve estimation

Keith Ciocco has more than 30 years of experience working in sales and customer service, with 25 of those years spent with QSM. As Vice President, his primary responsibilities include supporting QSM clients with their estimation and measurement goals, managing business development and existing client relations. He has developed and directed the implementation of the sales and customer retention process within QSM and has played a leading role in communicating the value of the QSM tools and services to professionals in the software development, engineering and IT industries.  

If you were unable to attend our recent webinar, "Critical Cost & Schedule Target Setting with Data-Driven Estimation," a replay is now available.

It might come as no surprise that technology organizations will spend millions of dollars this year on agile and traditional development programs. But did you know that many will lose big money and time because they don’t have an effective way to establish and negotiate reasonable cost, schedule, and quality targets? In this webinar, Keith Ciocco demonstrates how we use the QSM estimation tools to manage these major challenges and the uncertainty that can come with very early critical planning decisions.

Watch the replay!

On Wednesday, September 15th at 1:00 PM Eastern, QSM will host a free webinar, "Critical Cost & Schedule Target Setting with Data-Driven Estimation."

It might come as no surprise that technology organizations will spend millions of dollars this year on agile and traditional development programs. But did you know that many will lose big money and time because they don’t have an effective way to establish and negotiate reasonable cost, schedule, and quality targets? In this webinar, Keith Ciocco will demonstrate how we use the QSM estimation tools to manage these major challenges and the uncertainty that can come with very early critical planning decisions.

Register now!

The short answer is with an estimate! Early decisions are a big deal when it comes to software development and delivery. Whether its agile or waterfall, we need to figure out what the work is going to cost and how long it’s going to take, oftentimes without detailed requirements confirmed. Estimates give managers a good way to start the conversation with internal stakeholders and with clients. Should we take this project on? Is this going to cost 5 million dollars or 10? Do we have the resource capacity to fulfill the demand? Should this take 6 months or 12? Management needs to know the answers, ideally before spending major resources and before detailed planning takes place. 

By looking at thousands of completed projects, QSM has found that big money can be saved by taking a quantitative approach to finding those answers. Early data-driven estimates give us the ability to set realistic targets and manage the uncertainty that goes along with early decision making. I am referring to “Big Picture” data-driven estimates, before sprint level planning takes place.

With the SLIM-Collaborate analysis below, we can see a staffing profile that shows a gold estimate along with a more conservative green one; a two column chart showing a comparison summary; a scatterplot showing a risky effort target compared to a more reliable alternative and an industry trendline; and we see a risky gold cost estimate compared to a green high assurance one. The data shown here is saving this company from making a bad decision, a decision that could cost them a lot of money, time, and quality.

If you were unable to attend our recent webinar, "Leverage Top-Down Estimation for Better IT Planning," a replay is now available.

Technology organizations spend millions of dollars a year on IT project planning, delivery, and proposal work. Major questions around cost, duration, scope, and quality are at the forefront of the decision making process. All of this combined with the pressure of ensuring plans and proposals are realistic can make this process a challenging one.

Being able to generate early, top-down estimates while leveraging industry data and empirically-based models is essential to negotiating realistic goals and meeting customer expectations. In this webinar, Keith Ciocco will show how QSM’s SaaS solution, SLIM-Collaborate, can be leveraged early in the planning and proposal process to help meet these challenges.

Technology organizations spend millions of dollars a year on IT project planning, delivery, and proposal work. Major questions around cost, duration, scope, and quality are at the forefront of the decision making process. All of this combined with the pressure of ensuring plans and proposals are realistic can make this process a challenging one.

Being able to generate early, top-down estimates while leveraging industry data and empirically-based models is essential to negotiating realistic goals and meeting customer expectations. In this webinar presented on Tuesday, Feb. 23 at 1 PM EST, Keith Ciocco will show how QSM’s SaaS solution, SLIM-Collaborate, can be leveraged early in the planning and proposal process to help meet these challenges.

Register here!

If you were unable to attend our recent webinar, "Increase PMO Collaboration to Improve IT Portfolio Management," a replay is now available.

IT project portfolios are diverse - technologies, platforms, methods, resources and more! Ensuring that project priorities align with business strategies and resource demand requires project intelligence and better estimation capabilities. Join Keith Ciocco and Laura Zuber for this PDU-approved webinar to learn how to leverage centralized data about scope, capacity, cost, staffing and quality to explore estimate solutions that overcome common PMO challenges of shrinking budgets and scarce resources. See how tailored access and process workflow increase visibility and provide the tools for effective project prioritization, review and governance.

Watch the replay!

The onset of COVID-19 has revealed many dependent synergies in the world and their mutual effects on one another.  For example, the decrease in human consumption of fossil fuels, not as many cars on the road nor planes in the air has reduced carbon emissions resulting in cleaner air, at least for the time being. 

Another synergistic COVID-19 result affects the IT world, including estimation of software delivery.  Many organizations wisely instilled a work from home (WFH) policy to mitigate the potential spread of disease.  This new work format introduced a fascinating human experiment – can we be as productive en masse during a WFH situation as opposed to being in the office?  The lack of physical proximity stresses the importance of fluid and effective communication.  During pre-COVID-19 days, estimating software delivery was orchestrated through meetings in hallways and conference rooms to communicate project assumptions, constraints and lobbying for project expectations.  But post-COVID-19, we are reliant on remote/virtual contact, limiting the nuances of physical meetings.  Thankfully, there are capabilities in place to make this a fluid process within our SLIM-Collaborate solution. 

Imagine a software development process where “Big Picture” estimates can be generated before detailed planning takes place, where the estimates can be accessed on the web, and where only three or four inputs are needed to generate reliable information. This process would include intelligent models that take into account historical data and there would be a back office team that specializes in software customization available to do the heavy lifting. Finally, there would be business analytics and industry data (plenty of both) to help with project target negotiations and risk trade-off analysis.

Thankfully, there are science-based estimation solutions available that include the capabilities mentioned above. These packages can make estimation easier, more transparent, and help manage the uncertainty that can come with early planning. There are technology organizations that are using these types of tools to improve their time to market and the accuracy of their software development estimates.

But there are many organizations that still struggle with estimation. They spend millions of dollars each year developing and delivering software. The planning usually starts with senior management asking tough questions about cost and schedule targets. The project leads then try to come up with effort estimates for each person on the project based on experience and gut feel. These effort numbers are tallied up in spreadsheets to come up with an overall estimate, the numbers are usually negotiated and then a final estimate is born. The problem with this process is that it takes a long time to carry out and the estimates are usually inaccurate. This is because the methods don’t take into account the non-linear relationships, integration, and overhead that we often see in software development.  When the estimates are off, millions of dollars are spent trying to change course. The rest is history.