Estimate new work
Overview
Socratic helps you explore "what-if" scenarios for planning new work and understanding the impact on your existing roadmap. Ask questions about adding new epics or adjusting resource assignment capacity, and receive detailed analysis of how these changes affect your timeline and delivery commitments.
You can size new work in minutes, using the power of Socratic's intelligent forecast. To create a scenario for new work, you provide:
- A name (may be just a placeholder) for each new epic involved. Since this is new work, there's no expectation that these epics exist in Jira yet.
- An approximate size, by epic. You can choose small (S), medium (M), large (L) or extra large (XL). In each case, Socratic analyzes your average historical sizes (i.e. number of issues) for epics, and provides the quantiles from small to extra large.
- The Jira project where the epic will live. (This signals "where" the work will be done.)
- The team(s) of people who will work on the epic.
You may optionally also provide:
- Additional resources, e.g. "Assume 5 extra people."
- The percentage of each team's time that will be allocated to the work, if less than 100 percent.
- Any dependencies among the epics.
For example:
How long would it take to deliver the following new work?
- "Build new website" small epic, assigned to Frontend team
- "Optimize onboard" medium epic, assigned to Frontend team
- "Forecast v3" large epic, assigned to Data Science team Build new website must finish before Optimize onboard. All work in Agentic project.
You can experiment with any or all of the input variables—what is to be done (and how large it is), where it is to be done (i.e. the Jira project) and who will do it (the team)—to see how the forecast changes.
You can even name a target delivery date, and ask Socratic to optimize the variables to meet that date.
How it works
For accurate scenario analysis Socratic employs Monte Carlo simulation, considering:
- Historical actuals by person and project
- Current team capacity and utilization
- Existing work commitments and priorities
- Dependencies between work items
The scenario planning engine runs simulations that account for realistic constraints like team capacity, the likelihood of scope creep, and workflow dependencies. This helps you make informed decisions about roadmap changes and resource allocation.
Types of questions you can ask
A scenario requires some definition. Here's a simple example that demonstrates all of the parts of the definition:
- named worked,
- size for each body of work,
- teams/people (and their allocation) assigned to each body of work,
- the project where the work will take place
- dependencies
"I want to estimate 3 epics. Design (a medium) which will be worked by the Design team 50%. Build (a large) which will be worked by the Frontend team (30%), the Backend team (40%) plus 3 full time people. Deploy (a small) will be worked by the Infra team (20%). All of this work will be in the Engineering project. Build starts after Design and Deploy after Build."
After Socratic delivers the estimate for the work defined above. You can ask follow-up questions or adjust your scenario definition. Here are some examples:
- "What if Design is sized small instead of medium?"
- "What if all work is done concurrently"
- "What if we have 5 full time people instead of 3 for Build?"
- "What would it take to complete the work one month earlier?"
- "What if the Backend team was 80% allocated for Build?"
Reading the results
Socratic's intelligent forecast provides a forecast duration range in days and a likely date range, with outliers on the short and long side of the forecast, and a midpoint date. The forecast also renders a Gantt chart depicting the epics in question, and any start-finish dependencies among them.
Common use cases
- Roadmap planning
- Determining resource needs for upcoming work
- Prioritization of work
- Risk mitigation
- Budget planning
- Timeline negotiations