Creating Reality-Based Forecasts in Agile Projects

Agile project management approaches for estimating and forecasting are faster and provide more accurate results. This is what I call reality-based forecasting.

Agile approaches for estimating and forecasting are better than traditional approaches because they deliver better and more predictable results. Agile project forecasts are also easy to understand and easy to update because they are based on the team’s actual velocity. This is what I call a reality-based agile forecast.

Traditional Project Estimating Approaches

Traditional approaches for estimating projects are ineffective and as a result, no one believes or trusts them. Worse, traditional projects are frequently on schedule right up until they are scheduled to launch and go live, and then you find out that they are going to be late. And then it is frequently too late to do anything about it. Which is one of the reasons that traditional projects are 3X more likely to fail.

I was a project manager working in waterfall and traditional approaches for over 20 years. I always knew the estimates we were using were best guesses and I felt uncomfortable that others treated them as commitments.