"Oh ffs, can we please stop estimating!?" with Olga Loyev (70)

About the session

"Oh ffs, can we please stop estimating!?" Is something we often hear the teams say at retros and planning sessions. But yet we keep estimating. Why do we estimate? The answer is quite often “because we need to give dates”. Except projects rarely hit those dates. So how do we enable teams to stop estimating? Is that even the right thing to do? Can we do better at forecasts?

I believe that we can and in this session we'll discuss this and more. We’ll get back to the basics and look at the mathematical model of Little’s Law and project sets ups. We’ll discuss how to measure and apply Little’s Law to forecasts in software development at the start and throughout the projects. How to combine that with sales, large scale delivery plans and more.

And finally we'll look at case studies of how Red Badger teams moved from story point estimates to forecasting using throughput at Sky and Tesco. And how you can:

* Forecast future releases
* Build trust in the modeL
* Do price and cost estimates at early stages of the project

If you're looking to bring change into your project and to stop estimating, then this interactive discussion session will enable you to start applying Little’s Law in your projects, making difficult conversations easier and building trust in the forecasts.

About the speaker

Olga Loyev, Project Manager, Red Badger

Olga is a project manager who's passionate about innovation and technology. With background in management and IT she has traveled around the world and managed projects on 3 different continents. When not working or trotting the globe, she likes to master new hand (or head) balance poses at hot yoga and catch some live music whenever she gets a chance.

About the Venue

PA specializes in helping the world’s largest organizations become agile. We have specialized in organizational agility for over ten years and help companies to:

• Implement agile at scale and lean thinking, to increase the flow of value delivery

• Apply agile business design to strip out ‘bad’ complexity that hinders agility

• Execute business change methodologies to respond to change flexibly

• Create an agile culture to improve engagement, retention, productivity and employee satisfaction

We help create genuinely agile enterprises. Our impressive track record includes helping a global firm operating out of 100 countries to make the largest transition to scaled agile in the world at the time.