<p>Dear Colleague,</p> <p><strong>I know you've probably experienced at least ONE of these situations...</strong></p> <ul> <li>Your clients are chomping at the bit to get started on a new project, but you can already see that the timeline is too short and there aren't enough resources to do the job.</li> <li>Your boss has committed your time and expertise to a new undertaking, however, your team already feels that the focus is way outside of their areas of expertise.</li> <li>You're bidding on a project with a fixed budget and schedule, but the requirements are so vague and poorly defined that you feel queasy just thinking about giving an estimate.</li> <li>You've been wanting to locate a planning tool to help you ask the right questions at the start of a project, but don't know where to find a good, comprehensive one.</li> <li>You're leading a project that's ballooning out of control due to "scope creep," but no one knows a firm, yet diplomatic way to set meaningful boundaries.</li> <li>Your organization's new policies call for risk assessments on all new projects, yet your group doesn't have any idea of how to go about preparing them.</li> </ul> <p> </p> <p>And so on...these are just some of the challenges you might have run into. You're probably wondering to yourself, "Does it really have to be this hard? Isn't there a systematic way to estimate the risks, time, and effort required to complete a project - a way that everyone can agree on and that we can