The Impact of Poor Estimating - And How to Fix It

The team, running Scrum by-the-book for three months, was continually failing to meet its delivery dates. As a result, trust between the business managers and the team degraded almost to a point-of-no-return. The team, which held bi-weekly retrospectives, could not pinpoint the problems causing its inability to ship. Mitch Lacey was asked to assist the team in finding the root cause of its problems. He analyzed multiple aspects of the project-from individual work items to planning meetings. While multiple issues were identified, one thing stood out above all others--the estimation process used had caused the team to miss its deadlines. Mitch discusses the estimation problems the team was having, how they were discovered and fixed, and the resulting improvement in financial and customer satisfaction.