On Tweaking Estimates

As Product Owner for the project, I get to field a lot of interesting questions. I woke up this morning to the following question from one of my teams:

Hello Mike,

In our current sprint, we have planned 8.5 user story points. But after task breakdown we can see for a couple of user stories, actual story points differ from the estimated story points. What is the correct course of action in this case? Do we need to update product backlog for revised user story points? Then we can say the team is working towards achieving 11.5 user story points! Also, since our [project gate commitment] is nearing, should we reexamine the estimates in the product backlog, and revise them for the remaining user stories?

Continue reading “On Tweaking Estimates”