Hi Wilson!

Thanks for reading the article and the question.

I will start with the second question regarding who we invited to the meeting. We invited all team members to listen in to the advisory board meeting. The prioritization was done entirely by the directors, however. By listening in, the team got an idea of how prioritization was done.

With regards to estimations - there are two parts to this. The first estimate in the business case was more about how much time the submitter thought she could get from the board. I got some experience in this and usually recommended how many weeks the submitter could expect to get.

For example, let's say a person wished to have a brand new fancy system that probably would take half a year to create to be "complete." Depending on urgency and value, I would recommend different "estimates."

There was an example where we had to have a time reporting system in place meeting specific requirements because of audit recommendations -this was pretty critical. The recommendation had to be implemented within three months. There was no way we could have a complete leave system in place in that time-span. However, to meet the minimum requirements from the audit, we thought that we could have something crude and minimal in place quickly. The recommendation was to ask for one team for eight weeks to see if we could deliver the minimal functionality.

But the vital part of understanding here is that we never committed to what we would deliver after eight weeks - we only said that we would work hard to complete the business case's goal. BUT after the timebox expired, we would deliver what was "done" - no more or less. If they then didn't get the value they wanted, they would re-submit another business case.

The team purely did estimates for their User Stories, and the only purpose was to get a good guess of how many User Stories we think we could complete in a sprint. The overall estimate was more about time-boxing and then take a new decision to continue or not.

I hope that answers the question.