Estimates aren’t necessary on every project. In such cases, where can you shift your measurement focus?

If you have an established product, then you’re probably less concerned about big release plans. Instead, your priority will be to enhance your product regularly. For such situations, I’m a big fan of Ryan Singer’s “Shape up” approach.

Back in the day when agile still wasn’t a thing, wideband Delphi estimation involved anonymously filling out forms. You can do the same thing now, but more efficiently with online forms.

You don’t always need a long meeting to play the velocity game. It’s easy to run this using a simple survey.

Nigel Thurlow and Dave Slayton came up with this approach to estimate scope, at Toyota. You can use this to estimate size at the start of a project. You can also use this technique when you have to estimate a large amount of scope for an in-flight project.

Warp speed estimation is a way to quantify scope at the start of a project.