Post #858275
2026-03-30 11:17 UTC
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!
Replies (1)
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@publius@mastodon.sdf.org 2026-03-30 11:49
@wikkit@mastodon.social Among the many books accumulated by my late grandfather the petroleum engineer was a volume on PERT from around 1965. I really don't know how it was deployed in the Polaris program, but I've often heard that its main function in the Apollo program was to create a giant, hangar-sized diagram at Marshall which was deployed to baffle and intimidate visiting Congressmen who wanted to know where all the money was going and when they would see results.