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30 Jul: Our 19th Cutter IT E-mail Advisor: Cultivation

  

13 Oct: We've been selected to present 2 papers at the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference

  

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6 Jul: Compendium 7.27: All That Jazz

 

29 Jun: Compendium 7.26: Faith in the Process

 

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Performance Diagnostic
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Effectively Managing Projects
Planning & Estimation
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Planning & Estimation

Our goal is to provide you with a complete solution that will allow you to make reasonable estimates throughout your development lifecycle. You will be able to use these realistic estimates in the context of an overall project planning strategy that takes into account the business realities of constraints, priorities, and opportunities. This includes the development of improved estimation techniques that fit your culture, process and tool suite. It is more than the purchase of an estimation tool – it is the purchase of a complete and balanced solution.

The engagement is run as a project with you, with a clear understanding of responsibilities and deliverables throughout. The deployment of an estimation tool as part of this engagement is not a prerequisite – if you are making effective use of an early project estimation tool, we can support you in an overall planning approach.

Features

The primary feature of this package is that we work to provide you with a solution that is tailored to your specific needs, culture, and environment.

We provide a clear understanding of the value of implementing industry best-practices, and which of these are most appropriate to apply given your unique constraints.

Benefits

Some of the key benefits to be realized as a result of this engagement are:

  • The development of defendable estimates, based on the company’s historical project data
  • A realistic view of the lack of precision associated with an early project estimate, as a representation of the risk associated with the uncertainty of the information at that point.
  • Explicit separation of the technical estimate and the target and constraints, combined to generate a more informed bid or plan to completion.

Distinctions

This package has several key distinctions when compared to typical approaches:

  • Public training courses: Public training courses are necessarily generic as they include participants from a wide variety of different companies, with different planning and estimating needs. This package provides a solution tailored for your organization, your culture, your needs.
  • Estimation tools: Tools are not solutions. Estimation tools provide one perspective of the magnitude of effort required, but are insufficient. They must be calibrated with your historical data, and they must be used in the context of a balanced overall planning strategy.

Implementation

There are several key steps in our approach for supporting your planning and estimating practices:

  • Lay of the Land: The first step in any improvement strategy is to understand where you are. We work with you to map out your current planning approach and identify the points where estimation reasonably fits to provide maximum benefit.
  • Estimation Best Practices: An initial training session to align the key stakeholders in best practices and principles behind a reasonable estimation approach.
  • Creation of a Planning Procedure: A standard planning procedure (which contains an estimation procedure as a primary component) is key to your ability to create reasonable estimates in a repeatable fashion across the organization. With an understanding of your approach, methodologies and capabilities, we help you tailor your existing Planning Procedure to adequately address your needs, or we'll help you create one from scratch.
  • Gathering of Historical Data: If you have existing historical information from past projects, great! We help you determine what the best representative data can be for you to get started. However, many organizations have no baseline project data. We help you mine for data to start from historical records, and at the very least, work with you to ensure that the proper data is captured from projects in progress to provide the necessary historical information.
  • Action Planning: Based on the feedback gained in the initial discussions, a detailed action plan is generated that provides recommended approaches for moving forward to maximize your benefits from this engagement.

Please contact us for more information regarding this service.

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