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Easily Estimate Projects and Products

by William Davis

Estimating and forecasting don’t have to be time-consuming or difficult. This course will teach you how to use Microsoft Excel and a freely licensed estimation technique called Statistical PERT to easily estimate your projects and products.

What you'll learn

Have you ever had a difficult time creating a project schedule or budget or been unsure how to forecast when new features will be ready for your agile-developed product? If so, this is the perfect course for you. In this course, Easily Estimate Projects and Products, you will learn how to easily create estimates for any uncertainty that has common, bell-shaped risk characteristics, like how much a project will cost or how long it will take to develop features on your product backlog. First, you’ll learn the difference between estimates, predictions, and forecasts and why forecasts are superior to predictions. Next, you'll explore how to easily create probabilistic estimates using Statistical PERT. Finally, you’ll discover how Statistical PERT models your project and product uncertainties using the normal probability distribution curve. When you’re finished with this course, you'll not only know how to use Statistical PERT to confidently estimate your project and product uncertainties, but you'll know how to modify Statistical PERT to create even better forecasts in the future. Software required: Microsoft Excel 2010 or later.

Table of contents

Course Overview
1min

About the author

William W. Davis works in the IT industry promoting personal and organizational agility and sharing innovative tools/techniques with fellow agilists, project managers, developers, functional managers, and organizational leaders. William has 30 years experience working in IT as a software developer and technical project manager for numerous IT projects. More recently, though, William is a Scrum Master and an organizational agilist -- creating/delivering customized agile/Scrum training, offering a... more

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