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At work, we have a team that is working on various agile dashboards for project metrics (acceleration or burndown or whatever, all the stuff I would guess the majority of folks commenting on Hacker News dislike).

I've wondered if having structured input from various people + some training on making calibrated predictions (Hubbard's How to Measure Anything is a good resource relevant to project management), wouldn't be better. At least from a global perspective of "are we going to deliver on time".

1 comments

Just give everyone on the team access to an anonymous survey app of sorts. Let everyone on the team anonymously report the percentage of work they believe is completed. If you care about a deadline, let everyone anonymously report whether they believe the deadline will be met. Maybe weight the individual votes by how accurate they've been in the past. (To be clear, only those doing the actual work get a vote here.)

Middle management will hate it, but perhaps upper management might find it helpful.

Is this similar to what you are suggesting?

Pretty much. Some things to ease the process are to make the questions asked specific as possible (no good if the question can be ambiguous sort of in the end), and to have feedback (plus initial training to help people understand to make calibrated predictions). Feedback is important, so people get better at guessing over time.

Feed everybody’s estimates into a Kalman filter, haha.

God I want this. Started to work on a project management app where I'll eventually add it.

The book super forecasting really influenced my viewpoint on estimates of things and averaging these sorts of surveys are essentially the idea of the book.