What is the team cohesion & performance like?
Are they a high-performing team, or an entirely new team with no track record?
Why Important?
New teams lack a shared history and understanding. Their estimates on timelines, requirements, and architecture should be viewed with skepticism due to uncertainty about their capabilities and potential.
Established teams, with a proven track record and established relationships, offer more reliable assessments. Their experience working together fosters a deeper understanding of each other's strengths and weaknesses, leading to more accurate estimations.
Therefore, the level of trust in a team's estimations should be proportional to the length of time they have worked together and their established level of cohesion and performance.
Risk Mitigation Options
Unless you bring on a team that is already well established, the only way to mitigate this risk is to be patient and support the team on their journey to becoming a high-performing team. Just know that this process does not happen overnight, and the more pressure you put on the team, the more difficult it is for them to get in their groove.
The good news is that assuming the team makes it through the forming, storming, norming and performing stages, you'll be able to turn this from a red to a green as the initiative and their time together progresses.