Julia Wester
Julia Wester is a co-founder of 55 Degrees AB, a software company based in Malmö, Sweden that focuses on providing tools to make work easier for people, teams, and entire organizations. There she leverages her experience working in and managing high-performing teams at companies such as Turner Broadcasting, F5 Networks, and LeanKit. Also a professional trainer, Julia is a LinkedIn Learning course author, a member of the advisory board of ProKanban.org, and a recent course steward for Scrum.org. No matter the task, Julia’s ultimate goal is to help people get more done with less stress.
Find out more about Julia at https://www.linkedin.com/in/juliawester/
Title of presentation: What are the Odds? Forecasting with Probabilities.
Are you tired of spending more time estimating and forecasting when work will be done than you spend actually doing the work? Exaggeration or not, if you calculate the value of the time used by your experts to go deep into requirements to break down tasks and estimate time, how much does it cost? How often do those expensive estimates turn out to be wrong despite your investment? The exciting news is that there's a way that you can save money and stress to quickly generate forecasts that are as reliable, or better, than the ones you're slaving over today. In this session, you'll learn about the components of a probabilistic forecast and how to use two simple metrics, cycle time and throughput, to create and continuously update your forecasts. You'll learn that if you track the start and finish time of your work, then you can use your historical data to learn the possible outcomes and the odds of each, allowing you to choose the appropriate forecast for the level of risk you're willing to accept. When you leave this session you'll have solid tactics to answer the questions "How much can we complete by X date?" and "How long will this take?" for both individual and multiple work items.
Present Connection Track (Hall – 5.3)
What are the Odds? Forecasting with Probabilities.
Are you tired of spending more time estimating and forecasting when work will be done than you spend actually doing the work? Exaggeration or not, if you calculate the value of the time used by your experts to go deep into requirements to break down tasks and estimate time, how much does it cost? How often do those expensive estimates turn out to be wrong despite your investment? The exciting news is that there's a way that you can save money and stress to quickly generate forecasts that are as reliable, or better, than the ones you're slaving over today. In this session, you'll learn about the components of a probabilistic forecast and how to use two simple metrics, cycle time and throughput, to create and continuously update your forecasts. You'll learn that if you track the start and finish time of your work, then you can use your historical data to learn the possible outcomes and the odds of each, allowing you to choose the appropriate forecast for the level of risk you're willing to accept. When you leave this session you'll have solid tactics to answer the questions "How much can we complete by X date?" and "How long will this take?" for both individual and multiple work items.