Working on estimates

Posted on February 7th, 2011 by Sacha Chua

Today I sat down with my manager to sketch my learning plan for 2011. I’ll start off with skills for IT architecture: defining scope and estimating effort for projects, designing and implementing systems, and leading the development. For development, I’ll focus on rich user interfaces, modernization, and integration. Next, I’ll learn more about solution development. In the second half, we’ll see if I can learn more about leading teams.

I spent most of the afternoon working on documents of understanding and estimates for upcoming projects. It’s interesting work, although I don’t trust my numbers quite yet. I’ll get better at estimating the more I do it, and I plan to prototype something quickly to check some of the numbers for the riskier parts. It’s actually quite fun doing this number-crunching. It’s like balancing my books. (Yes, I’m weird.)

It’ll be even more wonderful when I’ve gotten the hang of doing these things. Yay learning on the job!

2011-02-07 Mon 21:52

More posts about: geek, ibm, learning // Add Comment »

Short URL: http://sachachua.com/blog/p/22081

On This Day...

2013: Thinking about joining HackLab.to — I’ve been taking month-long sprints of focusing on other interests, but now I’m getting ready to scale consulting back even [...]
2012: Notes from my exit interview with IBM — I had my exit interview yesterday. It was more of a follow-up, as I had found a list of common [...]
2010: Teapot — The teapot beside me is white Corelle stoneware. Nothing fancy, just a teapot. I bought it when I was a [...]
2007: Progress! — The Ruby on Rails web programming framework is just plain amazing. I added maps to my search prototype. The code was [...]
2007: Torture — Reading Dominique’s blog post about “Deal or No Deal” made me feel terrible about television shows. Marcelle told me about [...]
2006: Toastmasters — I gave speech #8 at our Toastmasters meeting earlier. I talked about secret happiness: colored socks for sunshine, dangling earrings for the [...]
2006: Tomorrow is my mother’s 60th birthday — WARNING By Jenny Joseph > When I am an old woman I shall wear purple With a red hat which doesn’t go and doesn’t [...]

sacha chua living an awesome life