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>"describe me a medium-sized or big project that you correctly estimated ahead of time without resorting to re-scoping the work? Anything that's at least a coup

by FpUser 2y ago

>"describe me a medium-sized or big project that you correctly estimated ahead of time without resorting to re-scoping the work? Anything that's at least a couple months for a team of 5-6 people." Easy. One example would be integrating bunch of telecoms following local market deregulation in Canada's CLEC's heydays. I and my buddy were leading a team of about 10 people (changing on on need basis but all senior developers) and first delivery signed off by client did happen in 6 month which was my initial estimate. The estimate itself had taken about a month to prepare before given to client. I develop new products for new clients for living. Nothing I do usually repeats previous work beside some generic patterns. It is my specialty and this is why clients like to work with me.

necovek 2y ago
To me it sounds like you did do some rescoping of work: if the number of engineers was fluctuating, that's the buffer you used because you might have misestimated. Also, did your "first delivery" include exactly everything that was part of that initial estimate? I would imagine your clients figured something else is higher priority and that pushed out some of the initial plan: if so, that would also be rescoping work. Again, I don't think meeting deadlines is impossible, but that you get there by reprioritizing and rescoping work as you go along. And sure, resizing the team too. On top of that, even if you really did deliver everything you signed up for 6 months ago (and not more — we don't want to be overestimating/underpromising) without fluctuating capacity or scope, most in-house teams do not get 1/6th of the time to estimate something before they start on it (effort sizing is mostly useful to decide on what to do, and then that time is best spent building it). And perhaps they couldn't do it even if they did get the time.

by FpUser 2y ago

necovek 2y ago

To me it sounds like you did do some rescoping of work: if the number of engineers was fluctuating, that's the buffer you used because you might have misestimated. Also, did your "first delivery" include exactly everything that was part of that initial estimate? I would imagine your clients figured something else is higher priority and that pushed out some of the initial plan: if so, that would also be rescoping work. Again, I don't think meeting deadlines is impossible, but that you get there by reprioritizing and rescoping work as you go along. And sure, resizing the team too. On top of that, even if you really did deliver everything you signed up for 6 months ago (and not more — we don't want to be overestimating/underpromising) without fluctuating capacity or scope, most in-house teams do not get 1/6th of the time to estimate something before they start on it (effort sizing is mostly useful to decide on what to do, and then that time is best spent building it). And perhaps they couldn't do it even if they did get the time.