Anonymous
Knowing the history of a project is good but not a requirement to successfully deliver a project. The way to estimate the expected work, would be to understand what is the business problem and then understand who are the various stakeholders responsible for delivering the project. Here are a few bullet points:
1) Having a clear understanding of the business need:
· I once organized a session where we clarified ambiguous requirements, which reduced delays caused by misaligned expectations.
2) Are the business requirements completed?
· I’ve worked on projects where siloed communication created bottlenecks, so I established cross-functional syncs to break down barriers and complete the business requirements.
3) What tools are being used to track the project delivery? Jira, Azure DevOps etc?
· I kept on-going discussions with the lead scrum master to identify what types of meaningful dashboards would help us be transparent on the progress of the project.
4) Are the technical requirements signed off on?
5) How many stakeholders are assigned to the project? Both on the business and technical side?
6) Any on-going risks being tracked?
· There was a time when I flagged an issue with the data that would have become a significant blocker later on, but identifying it early led to active remediation steps.
7) When is the expected delivery?
8) List out all the tasks that are necessary to complete the project and expected timelines for each task.
· This step helped me in a project where there were tight deadlines and the project was complex with multiple unknowns. Having a tracker helped the team stay on track.
9) incorporate any existing blockers into the timeline as a risk table to assess how much work is required and when it is likely to be delivered.
I was once tasked with a project as a business analyst which had several business analysts who had worked on the project in the past leading to unsuccessful attempts in product delivery. When i was tasked to the project i started by meeting with people and understanding what was required for the project to complete. After a long series of meetings and understanding of what work is entailed and getting all my questions answered by the stakeholders and getting required sign off, I was able to ship the project.
