Question

We are integrating with another software product and would like to track the time spent on conference calls and on internal discussions, but discussions are open ended and estimates seem to have little chance of being accurate. Can you offer any best-practices for estimating discussions? Do you add these cases to milestones or exclude them? Because multiple people will be in the discussions, it looks like the actual time spent will be very large. If we make a very large SWAG of an estimate, this could skew "estimate history".

I am aware of the similar How can I "work on" non-development tasks that have no estimate? question, but I contend this is different because I am asking for best-practices and how to mitigate the effect of large estimates that are likely to be outliers.

Answer 1

Here's what I do:

• make a global milestone with no due date and a non-label name like "not determined
• create Cases of Category: Schedule Item, Milestone: Not Determined for everyone who attends project related meetings.
• people schedule themselves Working On theses cases during meetings and discussions. the Initial Estimate for these cases are low and the Current Estimate is never updated... the result is that the Time Remaining almost immediately goes to 0 and the Case becomes useful only to track actual time spent on the task
• because the tracking cases have a global milestone, I don't see them in project report charts

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Of course you'll want to know if this works. The answer is, that's not the question to ask. I think the way to use the EBS reports in FogBugz is to use the system inputs consistently and then adjust your interpretation gradually over subsequent projects. As you see how your actual delivery times match the probable completion dates you get from reports you'll be able to predict outcomes more accurately. The practices outlined above are giving me results that I am beginning to be able to use.