Risk, Opportunity, Uncertainty and Other Random Models

2 Norden-Rayleigh Curves for solution development

In Volume IV we discussed ways to model and estimate the time, cost or effort of recurring or repetitive tasks, but we haven’t looked at what happens before that … how long, or how much effort do we require to develop the solution that becomes the basis of our repetitive task, or of developing that one-off task, especially if it is novel or innovative?

Even if we can develop that estimate by analogy to another previous and not too dissimilar task, or by parametric means, there is nothing obvious so far that helps us say how that estimate might be profiled in time; a problem that is often more of a challenge perhaps than getting the base value itself.

Perhaps the best-known model for doing this ...