One important thing I've managed to get a couple managers to track for quarter/half planning purposes: uncertainty. Prior to that, we'd of course hemmed and hawed and verbalized the fuzziness of our estimates... but only the final decided-on not-super-pessimistic number was written down, and decisions were made based on those. That was a major source of our estimating problems.
Everyone wants estimates. For decent reasons. But until we've done a similar thing before, they're utter fabrication. We can take a semi-educated guess, but we know they're still guesses... so for things we don't have concrete answers for, we give small/medium/large/extreme markers for how uncertain we are.
It's fine to take on a big unknown or two. You might even get them both done in a half. But they better be worth it (or you have to decide when to cut your losses), because completing those two could consume all of your resources... and if that happens and you didn't commit everyone to it up-front, you won't get it done this half. Making that tradeoff more explicit managed to get us signed up for fewer low-impact-but-highly-uncertain projects that would inevitably balloon out of control but never be cut.
Everyone wants estimates. For decent reasons. But until we've done a similar thing before, they're utter fabrication. We can take a semi-educated guess, but we know they're still guesses... so for things we don't have concrete answers for, we give small/medium/large/extreme markers for how uncertain we are.
It's fine to take on a big unknown or two. You might even get them both done in a half. But they better be worth it (or you have to decide when to cut your losses), because completing those two could consume all of your resources... and if that happens and you didn't commit everyone to it up-front, you won't get it done this half. Making that tradeoff more explicit managed to get us signed up for fewer low-impact-but-highly-uncertain projects that would inevitably balloon out of control but never be cut.