Estimating the effort of User Stories through practices such as planning poker is a fairly well-understood activity and works well enough for agile teams to understand work effort and required capacity. How well does this activity scale across a Program of several Teams, or a Portfolio of many Programs? The Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe) explains that effort estimation is required across the Portfolio so that enterprises can get some sense of the future. Furthermore, this activity enables the Portfolio to understand capacity requirements beyond the next Sprint or the next Program Increment and, ultimately, helps predict the success (or risk of failure) of value delivery. Estimating is an art, not a science, but we can learn from history to become better – more accurate – over time. To do this, we must capture the estimates – at all levels – and then examine the reality at the end of each planning cycle. Come learn about the estimation process prescribed by SAFe and how the SAFe support in CLM supports not only the process but also enables organizations to get predictably better through an understanding of current and past planning cycles. 

Speaker: Amy Silberbauer is an Executive IT Specialist in the IBM Rational organization. She currently serves as a Solution Specialist responsible for defining and driving Rational’s DevOps Steer and Scaled Agile solutions. She has hands on experience leading an internal SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) transformation project, evangelizing SAFe concepts within Rational and beyond to other teams in IBM, and working with customers considering similar transformations. She is a Certified SAFe Program Consultant. She is a recognized subject matter expert on software development lifecycle solutions, including Enterprise Modernization and SOA.