[cortesoft]

In my experience, the hardest part of estimating how long a project will take is estimating how much time things OUTSIDE of the project itself will take. How much time will be spent maintaining other projects? How much time will be spent helping other teams on things they need? How much time will be spent on random other things?

[jacques_chester]

> In my experience, the hardest part of estimating how long a project will take is estimating how much time things OUTSIDE of the project itself will take.

Of interest, the author mentions Work Breakdown Structures. A WBS is meant to obey the "100% rule": it must contain all the work (ie, sums to no less than 100%) that goes into a project and it include only the work that goes into a project (ie, sums to no more than 100%). So if something shows up that wasn't foreseen, you add it immediately and adjust the fractions.

So far, this is not helping the competing-work problem. That's where old-school project management adds control accounts. Each item in a WBS has an account where individuals "spend" their hours, dollars and so forth. If you have competing work, then the dollars and hours get spent on a control account belonging to some other WBS.

Finally, this typically gets rolled up into an "Earned Value" plot. You can show much time and money was intended to have been spent at a given point in time and how much has actually been spent. If you notice that the rate of spend is below intended, you go looking for where the leakage is. Since you can perform Earned Value analysis on any part of the graph of control accounts, you can quickly identify what's going on.

And that's when two project managers begin to yell at each other.

This kind of apparatus comes with a lot of overhead. But I think it's underutilised, even informally.

[iamasuperuser]

Thank you for the feedback. You clearly understand Project Management. I’m an advocate for Earned Value. It offers deep insights into a project during the Execution and Control phase. This ROM Auctioneering method is meant for the Initiation phase and allows the facilitator to create an accurate Rough Order of Estimation as possible, within an hour rather than the days or weeks that I typically saw it taking. One failing of this approach is that it doesn’t account for Critical Path identification or analysis. However, I suppose it could be the groundwork for analysis in that area and for Risk Identification too.

[iamasuperuser]

Determining the Critical Path, the sequence of events that must happen from Start to Finish, is the next critical step. This conversation pours cold water on the Mythical Man month. (If the manager 'gets it)