My team uses story points to estimate large projects over long periods of time. Sometimes things are overestimated, and other times things are underestimated. H

My team uses story points to estimate large projects over long periods of time. Sometimes things are overestimated, and other times things are underestimated. However, when you sum them all together, the errors tend to cancel each other out. I've found that upper management doesn't care whether any given task actually takes 3 days when we estimate it at 3 days. They just want to see a schedule where each task is estimated to take X days. It communicates that you've really thought through the plan. Then, in terms of results, what they really care about is that we track to the date we committed to for the overall effort. If a senior director is drilling down into a schedule and asking, "Why is this 5-day task taking Bob 7 days to finish?" that's a strong signal that it's time to change your management.