Do you struggle with making software project cost and schedule decisions

when it’s very early in the planning process?

Maybe you’ve had a project that lost a lot of money

or maybe you lost a customer because your project was delivered late.

These problems are typically caused by bad estimates.

What makes estimates "bad?"

They’re not based on historical data.

Estimates are more reliable when they are data driven.

Defensible estimates save development teams a lot of time & money.

This is why, at QSM, we encourage our clients to capture their history

and then leverage it early in their planning process.

Very little data is required to leverage a completed project’s history.

You just need to capture the Functionality Delivered, Total Effort, and Total Duration.

Once you capture this information, you can calculate a Productivity Index or PI,

which is a measure of productivity for the overall project or release.

The PI takes into account things like

experience level of the team, complexity of the work delivered, & maturity of the process.

You can load your history into QSM’s estimation tool, SLIM-Estimate, to generate better estimates.

You can sanity-check cost and schedule estimates against known performance

and identify unrealistic expectations.

If you look at the scatterplot here,

this blue datapoint is the estimate that you’ve run.

You can see if it’s realistic compared to your history and the QSM Industry Trends.

The real value is that you can do this before any detailed planning takes place

to make sure you understand the big picture before you make important decisions.

This is just an example of best practices QSM can help you implement

to improve your project and portfolio estimates.

If you're interested in learning more, contact us for a demo today.