Free 10-page guide

Give leadership a delivery date they can defend.

Get the five-step guide to using your team’s delivery record instead of another effort estimate. It shows you how to present a delivery date, explain the confidence behind it and put the decision about risk where it belongs.

5 Steps to Give Leadership a Delivery Date They Can Defend: the guide's cover

Inside the guide

The guide takes you from a delivery question to a commitment backed by evidence.

  1. Why do effort estimates fail?2
  2. Step 1: Where do you find the evidence?3
  3. Step 2: How long does work actually take?4
  4. Step 3: How do you turn the record into a commitment?5
  5. Step 4: What do you offer when leadership wants more certainty?6
  6. Step 5: Who decides how much risk to carry?7
  7. What question does the delivery record answer?8
  8. How do you say it with your own numbers?9
  9. What makes the date defensible?10

Why delivery dates become difficult to defend

Effort is only one part of how long delivery takes.

Work also spends time waiting in queues, moving through handoffs and depending on decisions. A date based mainly on effort does not account for the full time work takes to move through the system.

  • The estimate covers only part of delivery

    Effort does not include all the time that passes before an item is finished.

  • The rest of the system still affects the date

    Waiting, queues, handoffs and decisions can take far longer than the effort itself.

  • Leadership still needs a clear commitment

    The guide shows how to bring delivery evidence into that conversation without presenting certainty you do not have.

Sonya Siderova, Founder and CEO of Nave

About the author

The guide is written by Sonya Siderova, Founder and CEO of Nave.

Nave grew out of a product development team that was delivering just 25% of what it committed to. After adopting Kanban, the team began making decisions from delivery data instead of opinions. That experience eventually became Nave, a flow analytics platform trusted by 7,000+ delivery teams worldwide.

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