| Engineering projects often already encompass this whole philosophy by building estimates that roll up to a P10 and a P90 outcome. P10 = 10% chance of occuring, P90 = 90% chance of occuring. How it's typically done is standard scheduling packages, like Prima Vera, allow you to specify a band or range of duration/effort for individual tasks/activities. This, when combined with task dependency information (which you must give it in the form of a Pert chart or similar, it takes a few different formats of data) means it can calculate the critical path across the whole range of activities for an overall outcome and yield the project P10/P90. Then, you can run sensitivity analysis and identify key pivot points, look at assigning more resources to certain efforts etc etc and optimise the schedule, plus track actual progress as you go and make forecasts. But this is all based on the premise of doing the kind of engineering where you have some reasonable idea of what your actual goals and methods are before you start, so if you are running under agile you are probably screwed because even if you tried this planning, your planner/s could probably never keep up with actual. To understand the difference between an engineered project and an agile one see my comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31299834#31301616 |