I have a new project and a new team, and I’m asked to create a financial estimate for a data technology project. How do I come up with a reasonable forecast?

While conducting a workshop, a colleague asked how I would go about creating a reliable financial estimate for a net new IT data platform project, while establishing a new team.  It’s a great question given many organizations have a wide variance in estimation, with cause a lot of frustration from stakeholders. This case is a bit …

What are the key cost line items of an agile based IT project?

A question I often get is “What’s the all-in cost” for a project.  The answer is dependent on what is considered part of the project costs, versus support costs handled outside the project budget.  Let’s consider the all-in costs as if it was the only project in the organization. Labor:  Typically, the bulk of the …

What is the persona of a good IT project estimator?

Estimating projects is a specialized skill that involves art and science. Navigating scope definition, assumption, resources, dependencies with overall timelines and cost is a complicated endeavor. Ultimately, these estimates are predictive models of the execution. So who make the best estimates, forecasts and models…project managers, scrum masters, resource managers, product owners? Some of the strong …