What Are the Odds? Forecasting Without Estimates

Columbus Business Agility is back!
(Please give us some feedback - what would you like this meetup to be?)

Five years is a long time between meetups. We're picking it back up on Wednesday, August 26, and I wanted the first one back to be worth it, so I asked a friend whose work is perfectly relevant and also fascinating. Her talk is more than just your average AI + Agile story.

What Are the Odds? Forecasting Without Estimates

Every executive asks when it'll be done. Most teams answer with a date somebody made up. But your team's board has a better answer sitting in it already.

Start with what you can use right away: the throughput your team already produces, translated into the odds you will finish by a given date. No time spent estimating. No points. You can do this by hand, on a whiteboard, with the last few months of finished work. That answer is honest, and it beats the one you're giving now. But a whiteboard is a one-off. It's stale by the next planning conversation, and it's only ever about your team. Leadership wants to know about the whole department.

Keeping the answer current is a hard problem, and it's where AI earns its keep. At a trucking insurance company I directed autonomous agents to build what leadership ended up steering by: team views, then the portfolio rollup on top. That was six months of work. Parts of it moved startlingly fast, like restructuring how the company tracked its work, which took an afternoon. The slow parts were the human ones. Agreeing where work actually starts. Getting finish data anyone trusted. Teaching leaders to ask what would move the odds instead of asking for a date. I'll show how the system worked, what came out of it, and the snags we found on the way.

Come if you've ever been asked for a date and had no honest way to give it.

About Liz

Liz Rettig is a professional Kanban trainer and the owner of Lil Agile Monster, where she helps teams and portfolios deliver more predictably, and often faster, built on battle-tested Kanban, flow metrics, and forecasting. With or without AI in the mix.

Agenda
6:00 Arrive. Mingle. Maybe grab a drink and chill.
6:30 Liz's presentation and discussion about forecasting and AI
7:30 (or earlier) more time to connect and discuss

Sponsored By: ReadySetAgile.com - big thank you for our partnership with John Riley

Hope to see you later this month!

(Please give us some feedback - what would you like this meetup to be?)