How to estimate work without historical project data?

Question

In some teams, projects or project tasks are assigned to team members verbally. This leads to a case of "no available historical data for projects", which means, there is no way to know how much time was taken by a team to complete similar previous projects or the issues faced therein (helpful in risk management planning). One way to estimate a new project is to ask each team member how much time they would take to complete the task. However, they too have to guess the estimates.

Given this scenario, is it possible to create the task estimates without such historical data?

Answer 1

There are many techniques you can use. Relative estimation (complexity points) is extremely popular with technology teams, and they can invent their own baselines if they really don't have any historical data. Also, if teams use iterative delivery with fixed-size iterations and smaller-sized deliverables then estimation becomes much easier.

Your suggestion that verbal requests don't get recorded seems to be the root of the problem however. Team members could/should record the work they do, regardless of whether it's a verbal request or not.