Magic Estimation: Process to Estimate Agile Scrum Projects Fast

so a mistake that is made a lot with agile projects is that people expect accurate estimates from the very first day of the project and this is totally the wrong approach because the point of agile estimating and planning is to get an overview of the work ahead and to create a shared understanding with your team of how you want to approach the project in this video i will show you a process that will allow you to estimate agile scrum projects within 50 minutes and with enough accuracy to actually start the projects it will help you identify the risks of the project create a shared understanding with your team and prioritize and plan the next steps by the way hi my name is artheir i'm the founder of virtual wednesday and for today's video i created another workshop in mido where i'm gonna walk you through in a bit and if you enjoyed this video and want to see more of it then please do hit the like button below the video as well because this really helps to grow the channel so that i can make more videos like this in the future but enough talking let's jump into mido and go to the workshop okay so this is the workshop in mido as you're estimating in 15 minutes if i zoom out then you can see there are eight steps and we're going to end with a checkout where we're going to see if people are really confident about the estimations that they made in the workshop but first let's start at the beginning and start by what are we going to do actually so the idea of this workshop is to quickly estimate a large number of work items on both value and effort i will tell you in a bit what that means value and effort why are we doing this it's to get an overview of the project and everything that's ahead of us and also to get a shared buy-in from the team who's actually going to develop the project and also from the stakeholders of the project and then also you want to identify the risks of the project and spot them pretty quickly because that will help you to prioritize and plan the actual project this approach gives the opportunity to find high alignment within the team and the stakeholders but also high autonomy of approaching the things in the best possible way and then who do you want to evolve in these kind of workshops the product owner or project manager or whoever is responsible for the vision of the project the team actually developing the project so this could be developers but also designers or basically anyone who's gonna do the actual work to make the project a success and then it's also possible to invite stakeholders which will help you to get a better understanding of the value of the specific parts of a project and of course you need a facilitator probably if you're watching this video then you are the facilitator but if not then send this video to the person in your team who's gonna facilitate this workshop because the facilitator will help to really follow the workshop guidelines and get the most out of the time you spend together now when can you do this you can do this at the start of a new project to quickly get an overview and to get an idea of what's ahead of you but you can also do it during projects and especially if there are large new initiatives now before you actually start the workshop you need to prepare your backlog and you can do so by writing the specific work items on these post-its or you can make use of a usatorium map like i showed in a previous video i will link to the video below because the ustory map is also a great way to create more overview of the project and the different steps that are involved with the project but for the sake of this video let's go for these simple examples and if you're the product owner or if you're coaching a product owner then make sure that the product owner actually prepared this before the workshop because that will save a lot of time and also it would be nice to already send a short message for example with a video to the team so that they know what the project is in a nutshell and then in the start of the workshop you don't lose a lot of time by getting people on board in this case we have seven items that we're going to use for example of this video but usually you have 30 maybe even up to 50 items that you can estimate of course if you're going to 50 items then you need a little bit more time than the estimates that are in right now so let's copy these items and then go through the rules rule one no talking and that's actually the magic part of this workshop some people call this exercise magic estimation it's magic because people are not allowed to talk and this will remove a lot of discussions and still they are able to reflect the things where they're not sure about and rule number two it's in line with that no nonverbal communication so you're not allowed to influence each other with these decisions it's really about what you think about the specific work item so if you're a facilitator then make sure that these rules are followed and be strict about them because otherwise you will definitely will not achieve your time box and if people do start talking during the workshop then remind them that this is just to get an overview and that you have plenty of time after the workshop to go in depth about the specific work items okay and then step two business value round one and the idea in this round is that within two to five minutes because that's the time box every work item has been estimated on how much value it brings to the business we're going to do that by making use of these values over here so 10 000 is the maximum value bringing to the business and 100 is not so much value if you're not sure then you can put it in the question mark and the idea here is that you want to do relative estimates so it's not about hard euros or profit but it's actually about how much value does this work item deliver compared to the other one is it the same are they both equally variable or is one more valuable than the other so this is the first round of the workshop so what you usually do is that you give everyone in a workshop a couple of post-its which they're gonna plot on this chart and remember them that they have to do this silence so at the end of the round then usually you end up with something like this and because of that you can see pretty quickly that this work item to the person who placed it over here has way less value than the work items that were placed over here maybe by the same person or maybe by someone else what you will notice now is that people maybe disagree with each other and they maybe want to move each other's cards or maybe want to talk about it but still try to remind them that we're doing this in silence because in the next round we are able to move cards which you think should have a different value so set another timer of two to five minutes depending on how much work items there are and how many people are in the group but set a timer and then people are allowed to move each other's post-it but the thing is that they can only move it one time per round so let me give an example let's say i don't agree that this is eight thousand but i think it should be ten thousand then i move it up here and i also add attack with the old value so eight thousand was the old failure and in this way you can see pretty quickly that this one has been moved from 8 000 to 10 000 and that there's disagreement about this specific card so let's say in this example that only these things have been moved so this one has been moved from 1300 to 500 and this one has been moved from 8 000 to 10 000 oh yeah by the way what i forgot to mention if someone is really not sure about it then they can also place it at the question mark so if they have some questions about it some clarified questions then they can do so like this also in the first round so now we're moving to the next round which is to discuss the moved cards or the cards that are still at a question mark and the trick is to don't go into detailed discussions just try to get quick clarification and if that's not possible then have a more detailed discussion outside of this workshop this workshop is meant to get a quick overview and if you need more detailed discussions then do it so as a next step and this is where the facilitator plays an important part because if you just go out then people will continue and go in depth on specific cards so what you want to do is to go through the cards that have been moved one by one and ask who moved it and why and also asked who placed it and why they placed it over there and if they can find alignment within a couple of seconds or a couple of sentences then that's great then you can either remove the flag because then you know that you have an agreement or if they don't agree then you just keep the flag and then you know as the next step after this workshop we have to do something with this card so as a facilitator you really need to take the lead and go through the cards one by one and also keep the discussion short and suggest to have a more detailed discussion outside of the workshop if people go to in-depth so within 10 minutes you have an overview of the most valuable parts of the project and now as a next step we're gonna do basically the same exercise but then we're gonna estimate the effort of the work items so what you can do is to copy these post-its i like to keep them here as well because then you have some reference but what i usually do is to put them here in the question mark area so they're in the question mark area now and what we want to do in this round is to get relative estimates for these work items so the work items stay in the same lane but then you're gonna estimate them on story points and if story points are a new concept to you then just subscribe to the channel because i will explain story points in a future video pretty soon but back to the workshop so what you want to do is that in this round the team who is involved with the workshop they all get some work items again which they have to play somewhere and within the time box that you give them they have to estimate the work items which already have business value but they have to estimate them in story points and this is relative to each other again so if they are pretty similar in the amount of work then you put them in a similar column but if they are different and the search by product is maybe way more difficult than the search by postal code then you put it over here and now you can see the difference between the two pretty quickly so for this round you want to have all the work items in a specific column for the story points so let's do so so this is the first round of estimating in story points and again people might disagree with each other but they're not allowed to talk so we want to give the team an opportunity to raise their concerns and that's what we're going to do in round two again where people are allowed to move the cards and only the cards they think should have a different failure and then if they move it they have to flag it because then you can see the cards that have been moved and also a card can only be moved one time per round so let's say for example over here someone doesn't agree that search by product is a relative estimate of 80 but it should be more at 13 then you place it over here and again you add attack and you can use a different color because now you can see that this is moved from 80 to 13 and also it was moved in the previous round so this is something where both on the value and the effort there's maybe some disagreement so that's the second round of story point estimation and then you have an opportunity to discuss the moved cards again but same as previous step with the business value briefly go through them use a facilitator should take delete and go through the cards one by one don't go into detailed discussions try to get quick clarification and if that's not possible i have a more detailed discussion outside of the workshop so what you're going to do ask the person who moved it why they moved it ask the person who placed it at 80 why they placed it over there have a short discussion if they agree then you can remove the tag over here because then it's just 13 but if they disagree then you keep the tag and then you can plan next steps after the workshop and there you have it in 50 minutes an overview of your project with the highest variable work items on the top and the easiest things to do on the left and in this way you can easily plan your releases and your next steps of the project if you want to learn more about how you can do that to define the strategy of your project and to plan and prioritize then simply download the template of this workshop below this video and then in a couple weeks from now i will send you a message about the course that i'm working on to plan the best possible strategy for your agile projects and don't forget to like this video if you really enjoyed it last step which we already looked at is to check out so how confident are you about these estimations and this will give you a pretty quick overview of the team and the confidence and the things you did in the workshop so what you want to do is to ask them to write down their name and why they gave this score and this way you can see pretty quickly how people think of the workshop and the project and the work that's ahead of you and that's it for now thank you for watching and see in the next one peace you