If building products on behalf of clients, it is often necessary to provide early cost indicators or indeed agree a fixed cost upfront, in either case accuracy in estimation is highly valuable as it has a direct impact on either client trust or profitability.

Answering 4 simple questions about the nature of a piece of work is really not particularly complicated, especially given that these are questions they should probably be asking anyway. It’s not necessary in every environment, and not practical in others, but Agile — particularly Scrum — is all about empiricism. Transparency — means making information available to the team, and inspection means analysing this. I think giving your team more data is a fantastic way of achieving this!