Estimation - or How to Dig your own Grave

Entertaining presentational style and the talk contained a number of good ideas and practices.

Very entertainIng presentation. Both on the projector fail but more so the awesome topic covering some common problems but in a very fun way. Well done good sir!

Keep the line about physics and cocktails :)

A well delivered talk on quite a difficult subject. Also learned thy satisfaction is measured in squeaks.

A well delivered talk on quite a difficult subject. Also learned that satisfaction is measured in squeaks.

Both entertaining and interesting!

Great talk, and the slides looked lovely on the mac screen!

Well done, brilliantly delivered as usual - Made even better for being presented on my laptop ;-)

Excellent. The technology gremlins could not keep you down. Deffo a 10 on the squeakometer!

The best talk of the day, entertaining, useful and relevant. I wish my (salesman) boss could have watched it!

Excellent talk. Tech issues just goes to show that technology can get to even some of the best in the industry. Highly entertaining, and had some great ideas. Will certainly be applying some of them from next week!

Really engaging talk, and dealt with the technical issues very professionally. Certainly gained a few new ideas to try.

For me, the best talk of the day (and there were some good talks for sure). Projector fair may actually have added (was this planned ?)

Fun (without being silly)
Interesting and topical

I though satisfaction was measured in cats, not squeaks - please confirm!

had front row seats, and I can only say that even with everything going wrong (or because everything went wrong) I find it the best presentation of the day. you are comfortable on stage, that makes it easy to take in the great (and valuable) ingormation you brought to the table. funny and effective slides. shame the lights got dimmed near the end, because the last slides were far more visible. another plus was your interaction with us. all in all, easily worth 5 stars rating.

...or how to deal with adversity with panache! The tech problems in no way prevented Rowan from delivering an engaging, empathetic and humour laden talk, and a sign of his professionalism that he recovered the timing despite losing 10th minutes at the start.

Trust Rowan to weave the technical difficults into the content of his talk... as always, he demonstrated why he's such a good conference speaker, and his talk provided a lot of good content on the perils and pitfalls of estimating, and how to avoid some of them.

Great presentation and was intentionally and unintentionally funny at times! Good content on estimating development time (not using 8 hour days for example) and good introduction to MoSCow etc. Would be good to have a video of this to show sales teams and other colleagues! Well done

Fantastic presentation. Just when I was starting to flag after a very long day in comes Rowan to wake me up. He did superbly well coping with some technical gremlins and was very entertaining as well as providing some very useful bits of info. Rowan is one of those rare people that can communicate with both geeks and and business. Well done!

Fantastic presentation. Just when I was starting to flag after a very long day in comes Rowan to wake me up. He did superbly well coping with some technical gremlins and was very entertaining as well as providing some very useful bits of info. Rowan is one of those rare people that can communicate with both geeks and and business. Well done!

Fantastic and professional recovery from technical meltdown. Being able to see the slides as intended in terms of lighting and in their native format would have topped off the talk. Well thought out, well structured and useful content. Loved the visuals and the humorous and engaging presentation style. Always good value for money.

Another really excellent talk, I especially liked the Kano model stuff, which I'm sure is going to be particularly useful for me. I was also really impressed with Rohan's ability to shift the tone of the talk from fun, to a more serious delivery style depending on the material being covered at the time. I hope that if anyone saw my talk and then immediately saw this one will have had some of the dots joined up!

Rowan does a great job at picking what seems like a narrow subject, and opening it up and discussing it in more detail than I expect. He delivered the content professionally and coped very well with the technical difficulties at the beginning of his talk. Despite starting late, he kept the talk schedule on time and fielded some useful questions from the audience and answered well.

It was perhaps a little too focussed on delivering estimates for client work, rather than on in-house development (and its needs for accurate estimation), but much of it can be applied to both.

Rowans slide deck used beautiful images, and the copy was perfect, but as I am sure he is now aware, some of the diagrams were not visible on the projector, even to me on the front row.

A superb talk despite the problems getting it started.

I tend to enjoy the more technical talks, but Rowan's was easily one of the best. Excellent recovery from a disasterous start, with plenty of humour mixed in. Very amusing that the talk was so very relevant considering the problems.

Slides were unique and engaging. I was worried it would be rushed to meet the 4pm finish, but he managed to make this up without any noticeable issue.

Cool slides (from what I can see now). Great talk.
I will for sure start using the 1/4, 1/2 etc estimation technique. It actually makes quite a bit of sense!

Best presentation of PNP NW 2011 as far as I'm concerned. Well thought through and well delivered!

Fantastic talk, even effectively using the technical difficulties to his advantage. As a product manager always in the middle of making estimations, this was particularly relevant, and one of my favourite talks of the show.

After I had attended this talk I left the room with a wow-feeling. Rowan had some tech issues but he made the issues seem like none-issues in a very nice way. On top of that he delivered a talk that I learnt a lot from. What more can you say than... Just brilliant! :)

Really enjoyed the talk and Rowan did a great job given the problems thrown at him. Look forward to seeing the slides :)

A real gem of a talk, as much by accident as by design. A cascade of technical failures may have killed other talks but for Rowan it was simply an opportunity to make his talk even more enjoyable. "What could go wrong" indeed!

That aside, the actual talk content was spot on, and relevant to pretty much anyone remotely involved in development. Damn glad I was able to see it.

A fantastic talk on how to estimate your time and some amusingly unanticipated practical examples of how it can all go wrong.

With some interesting aspects of estimating a project I had never considered before it was invaluable hearing another developers take on it.

Also an introduction to the Kano Model... somthing to use in my next project I think

Another superb talk by, in my opinion, one of the best speakers at the conference. Rowen combined great stage presence, a very well prepared talk (with, yet again, a great underlying theme and graphics) and clearly distilled personal experience to educate and entertain on a topic that many of us grapple with constantly. Good insights and tips I am looking forward to trying out - plus extra points for very graceful handling of technical issues :) I know exactly what such glitches do to your nerves just as you start your talk and Rowen coped admirably.

What else can I add that others haven't already covered? Not much! Thanks for an entertaining and thought-provoking talk.

Very enjoyable talk on what, for most of us, I suspect, is a very difficult area. While it was based on the speaker's own work requirements, I felt there were plenty of items covered that could be used in any environment.

This talk was one of my top two talks of the weekend. Very entertaining, very relevant and very well presented.

The way Rowan handled (and dare I say even used) the 'technical difficulties' was a very real learning point. And that was just at the start of the talk :)

Excellent talk. Speaker was very engaging and funny. The topic was well thought out and arguments put across well.

An excellent talk despite all the uninvited technical fale. In fact Rowan may be one of the few speakers who could recover from that and still deliver an engaging and well presented talk without being clouded by frustration or despair. I'm also looking forward to more interpretive dance at future conferences :-)

The talk itself though was well put together and very relevant to a lot of people, though it's possibly our least favourite subject. It pointed out mistakes that I have made and hopefully now won't make again!

A lot of technical failure, but that didn't really do anything at all. To be honest, I didn't mind that at all. Rowan did it that good.

The combination of a very good speech together with very relevant subject made this to the best session for me. If possible I would give even more thumbs up.


Ps. Looking forward to whatching this session on video in a month ;)

really interesting points when dealing with clients

I've been to a couple of Rowan's talks now, always leave feeling like I've learnt something which is great. presentation was fun and even though marred by several tech failures he still got all the relevant points across.

Got some great tips and have already started looking at implementing some of them at work

Although Estimation or 'How To Dig Your Own Grave' : Rowan Merewood was riddled with gremlins, i got some genuine good advice about how i have been digging my own grave for years. Sorted out some changes in the way we do things back at work because of this, so cheers!