#Agile : Sizing Presentation

I have been in technology for over 15 years. I can share a bible of horror stories when it comes to project management. Last Friday I had the pleasure of presenting sizing to my company. How it relates to agile and scrum, the importance of the baseline, and how teams benefit by working towards the collective instead of a given individual. I managed to include a quote from “Tools of Titans” by Tim Ferriss, the paperclip from Microsoft Office, Cartman, and the Manitou Incline Trail. This was not the first time I have presented on this topic, and I am sure it will not be the last in my career. Presenting to your entire company a process that will have a ripple effect throughout the entire pond can be quite intimating. My plan was to bring in as much laughter as I could, and leave plenty of room for collaborative Q&A. I stressed the importance of the collective over the individual, velocity, burndown charts, and how everyone sucks at estimating. I have worked in a variety of project management systems led by a range of non-tech MBAs to lead engineers. They all had challenges. One item I learned from the hardest places to work was no pointing system, or a system without a solid baseline equated to not having a project management system. Many corporations claim to be agile and stamp it like a coin phrase over all their docs, but are not agile. In my early years, I knew that a 13 would mean it would disappear into the cosmos. Now, I can call Officer Shenanigans when that happens. Sizing should be collaborative, relative, and fast. This means one scheduled meeting every other week, and pushing business to have both a short and long term vision. Sizing is not about dates, it’s about effort,. Sizing by effort leaves out emotion, fighting for political gain, and drama. An example I like to use is it’s easier to plan the construction of the Burj Khalifa, than it is to plan a multi-tiered enterprise dashboard application. When done right business has the power to make informed decisions. This equates to an organization’s success derived from the collaborative successes of all of its parts working together to achieve a common goal.
