I subscribe to Mike Cohn’s newsletter and I received a post on January 20th, 2022 entitled—

7 Reasons Teams Underestimate Work.

It was quite short but sweet and valuable. I’m sharing his list of seven factors below.

1. Overconfidence

2. Lack of clarity about the feature

3. Estimating a best-case scenario

4. Multi-tasking is not considered

5. They aren’t including time to iterate

6. Not all work is included

7. Assuming they’ll be more productive than is realistic

And it inspired me to think of other reasons, not directly related to the team, that might cause the team to underestimate.

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