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Management Excellence Toolkit-Part 4: Improve Your Estimating and Forecasting Effectiveness March 16, 2011 by Art Petty Leave a Comment 27 Note from Art: Your decisions define you as a leader and a manager, yet we spend very little time in our busy lives finding ways to improve our abilities in this area. This Management Excellence Toolkit Series will help you recognize the challenges and pitfalls of individual and group decision-making and offer ideas on improving performance for you and your co-workers. Part 1 of this series emphasized the importance of developing, updating and referencing a Decision Journal. Part 2, focused on understanding how we make decisions and how various traps and biases often derail us. In Part 3, we …show more content…

The cost, time-to-market (or implementation) implications are huge! Alternatively, I’ve observed over-zealous executive teams declare a time-to-market mandate without consideration of the project complexities. The pressure on the project teams results in estimates executives “want to hear,” but that have no basis in the reality of the work. As time and cost estimates are missed, the environment tends to deteriorate into one of finger-pointing, excuse-making and general dysfunction Fear Impacts Estimates: While fear pushes project estimates out into the future, this same environment likely results in ultra-conservative sales forecasts on one hand and unrealistic cost estimates on the other. For anyone accountable for revenue and/or expense numbers, you tend to take your cue on these numbers from environmental pressures. I’ve observed managers who felt pressure to inflate revenue forecasts out of fear of being viewed as naysayers and poor team players, while at the same time, deflate expense numbers out of fear of being viewed as not having control over costs. Fear in the workplace creates estimating and forecasting gamesmanship. Prior Performance May Be a Poor Predictor: Much like the recency effect displayed by the Everest expedition leaders, we open additional trap doors for our estimating and forecasting approaches by relying too much on prior performance in spite of changing conditions. The past is

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