Hi Gillian, thanks for taking the time to respond to my post with this post of yours. As you probably expect, I can’t agree with your assessment on estimating. From your post I thought I saw three main items, which I am tackling below. What’s in italic is my translation of your point. My answer is non-italic :-)
1. You are fooling ourselves when you think that estimates take away insecurity. A planning based on estimates will always be ‘wrong’, meaning that we always will see that the real delivery date is different.
Estimates are there to predict the future as good as we can with the information that we have. A planning/roadmap based on these estimates should always have a margin of uncertainty. Treating estimates as commitments is misusing estimates and a sign of bad management. My questions to you here:
- With a limited budget and a number of initiatives, how are you going to choose which initiative to pick? Is it the one with the biggest value? How do you know this value if you have no idea about the estimated costs?
- How will dropping estimates help you out in a bad management situation as described above? Is management magically going to accept no estimates where they previously misused estimates as certainties?
2. We simply are bad in estimating. Why would one invest in this then?
I answer this one keeping in mind the description of estimating as I wrote above, because estimates are not the same as ‘knowing the future’. It is not a given that people are bad in estimating. Also, there are ways to improve estimating. Imho it is far too easy to just say ‘we can’t estimate anyway’.
3. Let’s just pick up items based on priority.
As said how do you determine the priority without knowing the estimated costs? You might invest in something that may turn out to be costing far more than you will ever get back.
What I see as a very big problem is how estimates are misused in an organization; the fact that a manager runs away with estimates and turns them into certainties, equally so with plan turning into commitments. Almost always things change along the way. That is normal and an organization failing to see that is imho a very unhealthy environment to be working in. Therefore I say: tackle that, tackle the unhealthy/unsafe working environment. Don’t tackle the symptom: how estimates are misused, tackle the underlying problem!
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