Used to spend a lot of time doing project/program management, and as such also trying to learn about it. I haven't gone looking for it recently but was linked to https://thesearesystems.substack.com/p/task-estimation-conquering-hofstadters and thought it was a good read, it's frustratingly rare to find writing based on real data.
The short of it is that experienced people are good at estimating the median of how long tasks will take, but it's a log-normal distribution and the mean is 1.65x the median.
And if you want 95% confidence, that's 5x!
Ben Brockert
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2026-03-30 11:17:01 UTC
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2026-03-30 11:17:01 UTCEvent JSON
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