Can a team discover patterns in the things they underestimate? I think good project managers can do this. There are tools like evidence based scheduling that a

Can a team discover patterns in the things they underestimate? I think good project managers can do this. There are tools like evidence based scheduling that attempt to formalise this through a statistical model but in my experience of trying it this only works where the work being done is the same every time (ie. the main premise of EBS is that someone doesn't need to be good or bad at estimating, they only need to be consistently one or the other - but that consistency is notably absent on smaller teams where you are faced with a wider variety of types of work). I think that, as a project manager, I have developed a reasonable intuition for how reliable each member of my team's estimates for different types of work will be and it gives me some reasonable sense of when I should schedule in meetings with clients, whether or not we should remove features etc. but it's total voodoo and I get it wrong quite a bit :)