Estimation Tips for Building Self Managing Teams

Estimation Tips for Building Self Managing Teams

Offshore Team has committed the deliverable for Friday morning and it is Monday still team is struggling to deliver. They have been working late nights, on weekends and still deliverable is not yet ready.

Does this sound familiar?

Here are some tips for building Self Managing teams, improving their time commitments. We conduct following activity for every technical task assigned to the team.

• List Sub-task

  Team member comes up with detailed list of sub-tasks for each task.

• Estimate

  With this list of small sub-tasks available, team member associates time estimate with each sub task. Each sub-task should be small enough to be completed in 1 to 2 hours. If there is a sub-task which is going to take 4+ hours to complete then one more level of task breakdown is required.

• Review

  Review is integral part of the estimation process. Either it can be a peer review or by lead in the project team. When team member explains the tasks, sub-tasks and estimates to another person, most of the times she herself can identify loopholes in her plan.

• Share it with Product Owner or Client

  Share these sub-tasks and estimates with Client. Product Owner/Client’s review can be helpful to surface any misunderstanding by team before start of actual implementation.

This activity is in line with agile practices and it is in addition to other project planning practices in the life cycle. When you want to build Agile, Self-Managing teams, such activities can come handy.

When Clients are working with Offshore teams, it is like building their extended teams by sitting miles away from them. Many of offshore teams and Onsite teams are using various practices for meeting delivery timelines.

I hope this helps you and would love to hear, how you have addressed it.

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