Combining two types of estimates under one plan

[Deleted user]

Hi All,

I'm hoping someone can help advise on possible approaches to this problem I am facing. I have a project that spans multiple business units from marketing to legal and technology to compliance. My technology team would like to use story points for estimation however my compliance and legal team work on tasks that are extremely sequential in nature hence they want to use man days. For example: .... we make an application with with a government then they respond with x days then we do the next step.... so it kind of goes against the entire agile mindset. Am I trying to achieve the impossible here by combining the two different approaches?

Any ideas on how I can accommodate both approaches but integrate into a single portfolio/plan?

cheers

Andrew

[Stephen Wright _Elabor8_ · Accepted solution]

Hi @[deleted]

The answer is - sort of.

Portfolio needs one type of estimation per plan to work - but you can do one of two things to populate issues without an estimate of the type chosen. I'm not sure which version of Portfolio you're using, but the steps are pretty similar.

Unestimated Issues:

1. Go to your plan, select options next to the plan's name (3-dots - in the upper-left) and select Configure
2. Select Scheduling from the left-hand menu
3. Under "Unestimated item scheduling" you can choose to either set a base number of story points for those non-pointed tasks - or base on target dates.

Using the latter, you could set the number of days each task will take using Target Start / Target End dates - when set to this these items are scheduled to last the duration of their assigned sprint, release or those specific dates.

Conversion:

1. Go to your plan > options > Configure
2. Select Issue Sources from the left-hand menu
3. Click Advanced Settings next to an issue source
4. Select "On" for the option of converting time to story points
5. Select how many hours is considered a story point

This means you can convert time to a number of story points, baselining effort and complexity. I wouldn't say this is ideal when story points are not meant to represent a specific timebox, but it would allow you to get a rough idea of effort and timeline.

These are some options - let us know what you think.

Ste

[Deleted user]

Thanks Stephen this is very helpful. Appreciate your time.