Stoplight Estimates

Traditional projects thrive on estimates and humans are terrible at estimating. No really, we’re bad at this. Bad enough that college papers have been written correlating our failures with evolution. Bad enough that we’ve developed several competing terms to describe different perspectives on this same phenomena. Hofstader’s Law, Parkinson’s Law, and the Planning Fallacy all deal with the idea that you basically have no idea how long it will take you to finish what you’re doing. This is somewhat better than people who generally have no idea what they’re doing. At least your only problem is with time.

Poor estimations are more costly at the

Management Reserves & Estimated Monetary Value

In project management, a Management Reserve is “an amount of the project budget withheld for management control purposes. These are budgets reserved for unforeseen work that is within the scope of the project. The management reserve is not included in the performance measurement baseline” (PMBOK).

There are three different types of management reserves identified in