If your organisation’s culture isn’t amenable to this level of scrutiny, then you’ll probably have a hard time with it.

The problem I have with the type of scrutiny you describe (and I've been there before) is that the information flow is entirely too much of a one-way street. Information gets extracted and shovelled into the gaping maw of Microsoft Project, with little feedback other than "hurry up!" to the troops. This serves the interest of the top-level stakeholders, but fails to help me recognize patterns in my estimation behavior.

Without seeing these patterns, how can I improve? It does me little good for a spreadsheet somewhere to say "When Dave says X, add 30%". There's little instructive value in that number. Is that 30% on all estimates? On some? Am I more accurate when estimating some classes of tasks than others? Are there patterns I need to know to recognize, so that I can avoid the "just another day, i'm almost there" trap?

The last time I looked at O'Connell (a few years back), it seemed that he was good on the planning and execution side, but had big gaps in the individual improvement area. If that's changed, I'll revisit his site.

In reply to Re: Re: On Improving One's Estimates by dws
in thread On Improving One's Estimates by dws

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