Author: Richard Mabe

The transition to agile management approaches for Software development has introduced even more challenges for cost estimating teams, especially as they support long-term budget development and program execution. Learn about how Unison Cost Engineering is internalizing an agile program into TruePlanning.

In the federal government, budgets require a multi-year planning cycle. Therefore, any effort to reduce the uncertainty of future year program costs leads to better and more defensible budgets for those years. But Agile programs focus on near term workload and activities with only limited future planning cycles identified. Future cycles are only activated as their start date nears. So any model-based cost estimate or predictive analysis for the budget needs to be flexible, responsive and adaptive to the daily dynamics of Agile program planning and execution.

Commercial businesses and government agencies are migrating significant infrastructure and workload from their in-house data centers to commercial cloud providers. The transition from their own facilities and equipment to commercial cloud domains has proven to reduce the cost of IT, while continuing to provide flexible, scale-able and secure services. Commercial cloud services have proven to be as capable, fast and reliable as their own in-house services.