Bryne Software's joint ownership of estimates.

I interviewed at and accepted a job at Bryne Software in this latest round of job hunting, and it would have allowed me to stay in the St. Louis area given that it was in Chesterfield, but ultimately the job in Minnesota trumped that. Anyhow, Bryne is a product company offering two core products that have to do with roadway infrastructure civil engineering stuff and beyond that they also do custom consulting for their clients and therein comes the whole challenge of trying to scope a project to x number of hours when doing an estimate. The estimating game is of course tricky stuff. A lot of times, and really most times, from a sales perspective, you cannot just talk a client into an Agile process where they pay sprint-to-sprint. Towards the end of my time at Headspring the plan was to try to do estimates and then just bail if development got partway in and the estimate seemed way off. For example, if something was estimated as taking twenty hours of work and then, ten hours in, it became obvious that there was another hundred hours of work left to go, Headspring would just give the client back all of their money and wash their hands of it. Bryne had another approach in which several team members all dog-piled their thoughts into an estimate and there was joint ownership of the estimate. This was intriguing.