‘Give me an estimate or forecast’

As a Business Analyst, Product Owner, Scrum Master, Project Manager, Portfolio Manager, etc., you are often asked this question. To give a valuable answer, you need to ask the right questions yourself and look at the right data (which you probably already have).

Sometimes a task, project, program, or portfolio is well-known, understood, and defined. But sometimes it is very uncertain. How do you approach this? And what is the impact of the way we are organized on estimates? Sometimes estimates are a guess, sometimes they’re useful, and sometimes they’re complete nonsense. How do you tell the difference?

Don’t chop up the elephant

Classic estimation techniques such as ‘chopping the elephant into pieces’ do not work well in a complex context. In fact, this technique often underestimates the required time and effort by a factor of 3 to 4 in a complex organization. What techniques are applicable in such a context?

This workshop has the answers.

Increase your estimation accuracy

This workshop is a road trip along ‘fat tails and common sense’ based on ideas and concepts from books such as ‘Antifragile’, ‘Fooled by Randomness’, ‘The Principles of Product Development Flow’ and much more. This is supplemented with buckets of experience from two practitioners in organizational change and supported by practical group exercises.

The main goal of this workshop? To increase the accuracy of your (task, project, program, portfolio) estimations.

What will you learn?

During this unique afternoon workshop, you will learn the following:

• Concepts related to estimation and uncertainty
• Types of work and estimates
• Basic techniques for estimation
• Which techniques work best in which contexts
• What to estimate
• How to apply these techniques in practice, including what questions to ask, what data to collect, and what to pay attention to

This workshop is intended for…

… business analysts, product owners, scrum masters, project managers, program managers, portfolio managers, etc. working on complex, usually agile projects, who want to answer better questions such as ‘Give me an estimate, forecast, estimate, prognosis, …’