If Management Sucks at Time Forecasting, What Should You Do?
Process Improvement Over Time Estimation
Management sucks, everyone fucks
I already kept the post for several months, and thought someday I should take some time talking about the problem. I think many employers might have ever suffered from the similar scenario in your environments. Some senior managers with outdated mindset often requires everyone to provide timeframes for their own tasks and just for generating a gantt chart for a report. Further more, They might even interfere with developers’ work as actual done time is unexpected, which always get them annoyed.
From the author’s post, I was sympathy for his situation because I had once suffered from the same context and had felt frustrated with the senior manager’s behavior. Also, the poster had tried to come up with some methods to help the team estimate the developing velocity, which I think might be more suitable for the measure of delivery capability.
So I decided to write the article to explore what you could do if you were encountering the same thing.
Forces Between Different Roles
So, let’s analyze the perspectives from the 3 role: the senior manager, the development team, and the poster. This would help us understand what kinds of problems every role is facing and try to reach a compromise between them.
For the senior manager, he directly supervised the team and is responsible for the upper management. We fully understand he needs some data, which is usually the progress, to assist the upper management profile the vision and when to achieve the objectives. However, his mindset was still old-fashioned with waterfall project management that often caused the team to take additional time to provide progress.
For the development team, they were in charge of delivering increments to the customers. Nonetheless, they were suffering from the senior manager’s interference because they would be reviewed from task to task for precise timelines, which implicitly stressed them.
For the poster, he might be a project manager or a related role who took charge of negotiation between the senior manager and the team to reach a balance, no matter in collaboration or communication. He’d tried to apply an estimation technique to provide accurate reports for time forecasting, but he still needed to eliminate the senior manager’s negative behavior on the team. What should he do?
When you read here, I hope you to take 10 minutes to think about what you should do to lead the poster to balance the forces between other 2 roles, and achieve the common goals for the team.
Reasons Behind The Phenomenon
I understand most readers would blame the senior manager for his old idea to tracking the progress. But wait, we need to step back and see the root cause for the context. In my opinion, it is the mindset that derives into the problems, and I’d like to talk about it from 3 perspectives.
For one reason, time forecasting in agile projects is essentially wrong. I know the viewpoint might be different from yours in project planning, so give me some time to explain the reason. Many people, especially the management, need an estimation to help them imagine when the expected result is to be delivered. But you know timeline is always changing due to various factors, and we spend lots of time requiring a team to give precise timeline of tasks, even adhere to what they provide, which bothers them because they cannot fully engage in what they are doing.
Conversely, the secret to boosting the accuracy of estimation is build shared understanding, as possible as you could. In this case, or other cases, the senior manager had been stick to the deadline for a long time, and that made him ignore the intention of most estimation methods — process improvement, especially for agile projects. What a genius to think of achieving an item in 1 day by 3 developers rather than completing it in 3 days by 1 developer. It is ashamed.
Working Software Is The Primary Measure of Progress
In agile principles, we say “Working Software Is The Primary Measure of Progress”. Please remember it is “Working Software”, which refers to a “Happened Fact”. Therefore, any estimation that cannot reflect the essence of a happened fact is simply a prediction, especially estimated time.
For another, business contexts often conflict with agile principles. For the senior manager and the management, they need a plan, no matter it is precise or not. But, the agile principle tells you “Responding to Change over Following a Plan”. In this case, the senior manager used gantt charts to track the progress, which made him fragile to subtle changes.
Most people with waterfall mindset have the similar syndrome.
For the other, most estimation methods aims for report, not for process improvement. Well, I mean people’s attitude toward the tools as they were using it. I don’t deny the value of estimation techniques; just would like you to change your focus on the other side of these methods. The author had proposed his solution to for reporting — story point estimation, to evaluate the velocity of the team. That’s great only when you use it with a correct mindset. But I am unsure how the author faced the senior manager with burn-down charts when he was asked to provide precise timeline with the velocity. Hmm… And the development team might still get suffered from his old-fashioned management style.
Practices For The Dilemma
So, are there any practices available for the tough situation? Of course there are. If I were the author, I would applied the approaches below to relieve the condition.
- Hold 1–1 session with the senior manager seeking the alignment
As you already understand from the post, the senior manager had an outdated idea of tracking progress, which bothered the team collaboration. In order to eliminate constant interruption on the team work, the author needs to play as a negotiator to point out the problem with the senior manager, and provide alternatives to replace the current report format. But what is it? Let’s look at the next point.
- Balance expectation among stakeholders with a product roadmap
The management always need a plan. To speak it more clearly, they need an adaptive plan to adjust their expectation to the result. From my past experience, I would up front profile the overall product roadmap with dates and deliverables. But I would clearly tell them the arrangement would be adapted to real conditions. So don’t take much effort to track the team task by task, which totally consume them a lot of time to handle the management’s expectation.
Providing a reliable, adaptive product roadmap is the best way to eliminate frequent interference from the managers, and it is dependent on the consensus between the author and the upper management. That’s why he needs to hold a session first with the senior manager.
And the next question is “How to effectively adapt the product roadmap to real conditions?”
- Never stick to estimated data, stick to process improvement
I’ve indicated any estimation technique aims for process improvement, and never stick to estimated data. I really appreciated that the author wanted to apply story point as an estimation tool to evaluate the delivery capability of the team. Whatever metrics you use, like story point, lead time, etc., adapt your product roadmap according to the result instead of your expectation.
Coach’s Murmur
In this article, I’ve described the tough situation the author faced, analyzed the forces among different roles in the context, indicated 3 reasons behind it, and proposed 3 steps to solve the problem. I know some people might have not thought of directly facing such a senior manager for the team. That’s exactly the first step to understand how “servant leadership” works, and the poster perfectly showed me the implicit trait.
If you are still suffering from the same condition, I bet the link below could help you.
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