Growth provides an amazing incentive to work smarter. At 12 employees today, PICnet's growth spurt has reached the point where working longer hours isn't going to cut it. While I get few hours of sleep each night, PICnetters know that I don't want to see the company follow down my path. It's the "do as I say, not as I do" approach to sleep.
One of the most critical pieces to working more efficiently is better forecasting, and we're taking a stab at a powerful tool called FogBugz to help us better track tasks as well as to more accurately predict completion dates. FogBugz 6.0 includes an amazing feature called Evidence-Based Scheduling (EBS), which our project management department is drooling over. Here's the scenario to help understand why PICnetters are excited about EBS:
Imagine a reality where project managers and developers can agree on the release schedule of a project based on past performance data, predictive complexity data, and corporate calendars. Imagine a meeting where project managers can leave a scheduling meeting saying, "I know with X% probability that this project will launch on time", and developers can leave saying, "man, it feels great to not have to make guesstimates that are force fit into PM's schedules".
As the FogBugz site says:
You can find out how realistic that official date is, so you can tell your boss with a straight face: "Yes, we can ship on time. With 4% probability."
From what we've seen so far, FogBugz's EBS functionalities has a good chance of making easy forecasting a reality. We'll do our best to keep you posted on our experiment with FogBugz, and track our overall response to the effectiveness of EBS in project management.
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