Advanced Agile Estimation, Planning and Forecasting

How long will it take? How much will it cost?

These two questions have haunted software developers since 1st Jan 1970

Upcoming Public Training Courses

LIVE
VIRTUAL

Advanced Estimation, Planning and Forecasting – instructor-led (live virtual)
Online, Worldwide

3 x 4 hours 

Price: £495 + vat

Private Group Bookings

We offer considerable discounts for group bookings. If you would like Solutioneers to run this course privately at your organisation then please get in touch.

Organisations often struggle to accurately estimate work, resulting in damaged stakeholder expectations, late delivery and demotivated staff. In this series of workshops you will learn how to accurately estimate Agile user stories, Features, Epics, projects and even entire programmes of work using the latest techniques from industry experts. 

The course modules may require you to unlearn what you’ve been taught in the past, so we start with the basics and take you through an interactive and highly engaging journey of relearning.

Once you’ve completed all modules on this course you will be able to confidently answer these common questions:

  • How can we know how many work items we can complete by a fixed date?
  • How can we confidently know when this feature or project will be completed?
  • When will my work request be done?
  • How do we stop our estimates from becoming commitments?
  • I’ve got an idea for a new product! How long will it take to bring it to market? How much is it likely to cost?
  • How to deal with “Your estimates are too high, please re-estimate.”
  • Do we estimate Epics in the same way as user stories?
  • How do we estimate, forecast and track progress at scale across multiple teams when every team is different?
  • How do we estimate a large project or programme of work before we’ve even started it?
  • How can we make our teams delivery rate more predictable?

All course modules are hands-on and highly interactive incorporating a number of estimation games, forecasting tools and flow simulators.

Topics Covered

  • The cone of uncertainty
  • The language of estimation
  • Absolute vs Relative estimation
  • Sizing vs Estimating
  • Sizing User Stories
  • Sizing Epics & Features
  • Agile Story Points
  • Burn-up & Burn-down charts
  • Cycle time & Lead time distribution
  • Story Points vs Cycle Time
  • Common causes of variation
  • Exploiting “levers” to reduce variation
  • Little’s Law – Cycle time, Work in Progress and throughput
  • Constraint driven estimation
  • Reference class forecasting
  • Probabilistic forecasting
  • Monte-Carlo simulation
  • Estimating and planning in a dependency rich landscape
  • Risk Management and its important influence on forecasting
  • Portfolio level planning & tracking

Who we've helped

What about certification?

We strongly believe in having flexibility in our approach to delivering real world training, that drives value and gets results. Our workshops are accredited by Solutioneers, meaning we are free to select the best practices from a broad range of methods to deliver unique learning experiences.

Our trainers engage every day in a coaching capacity with teams across a range of industry sectors and markets meaning our clients benefit from:

  • the latest software development techniques
  • the best Lean and Agile methodologies and practices.
  • building ‘best in class’ in-house capabilities.

All attendees will receive a certificate of attendance.

Cancellation & Refund Policy

We offer a 80% refund if you cancel your place no less than 15 working days before the date of the first day of the course.

For cancellations less than 15 working days from the date of the first day of the course we do not offer a refund. However, you will be offered the option of substitution, so you can transfer your place to a colleague. Substitutions will be accepted up to the start of the course.

Solutioneers reserve the right to postpone or cancel this event if there are insufficient registrations or if presenters are unable to attend. In these circumstances, you will be notified no later than 7 days prior to the event with a full refund.

Please be advised that courses are subject to changes in date and/or venue. It is recommended that you purchase changeable and refundable transportation and accommodations. Solutioneers will not be responsible for any incurred costs in the event that we need to make changes due to circumstances beyond our control.

Meet your trainer

Ian Carroll

Brickell Key Award winner Ian Carroll is a consultant, coach, and speaker on all topics related to Lean, Kanban and Agile software development. Using his 30 years of hands-on experience he helps teams transform their ways of working using Kanban and other Lean and Agile techniques to lower costs while increasing their ability to respond to changing market demands and outperform competitors. Ian has trained and coached hundreds of software development teams in Agile, Lean, and Kanban techniques.

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