Day 69 — Creative PM series 3/7: “Effort Assessment”
Have you ever been asked “how long will it take?” Or “how large the effort is it?” Whether it’s a year-long project or a one month engagement, it’s fairly important to understand how much effort and resource will be involved in order to “setup for success.” In today’s article of “Creative PM series”, I’ll share my knowledge and experience around effort assessment in the following structure:
- Why we need effort assessment
- When to evaluate
- How to do it right
Why we need effort assessment
There are times we want to have a good grasp about our internal resource allocation, and there are also times we’re asked to provide to our partners/ counterparts for all sorts of reasons. I’m listing out some common benefits of effort assessment:
- Project/ organization funding: The funding process could happen at the end of the year for the next 1–3 year planning, or it could also happen on an ad hoc basis. When the funding process starts, UX/Design director or leads are often asked for effort assessment in order to plan for required resources/ headcounts. An accurate effort assessment helps determine reasonable resources in order to “get the job done”.
- Resource planning & allocation: When we manage a team of talents, director or lead are often juggling with project pipelines and resource planning/ allocation. A good effort assessment can facilitate the resource allocation process to be more accurate. The more accurate they are, the less burden for team members from feeling burnout/stressed, or bored.
- Clarity for more accurate project planning: Whether it’s from PM, tech lead, or other counterparts, we are often asked how much time we need to engage the creative process so that they can plan their work accordingly. Product team often needs to craft a roadmap; Agile team often needs to have design deliverables ready before Sprint planning; and business team would like to know how the effort is evaluated in order to consider the ROI of the engagement. With a better process of effort assessment, not only we can have a efficient communication with our counterparts, also we can structure our creative talents in a transparent way so that nobody gets confused.
When to Evaluate
1. Pre-planning
This usually happens way before the project starts. It could be annual planning for the project pipeline next year, or a early intake on the effort level of a Proof of Concept (PoC). The goal here is rarely creating an accurate estimate, but a high-level idea of what kinds of talent will be involved in what types of process, and roughly how long it’s going to take.
2. Project planning
Before the project starts, talents and resources need to be allocated in a logical way so that we can capture the various types of project needs. By providing a somewhat accurate effort assessment, the team can better understand how to collaborate with each other and when to expect a touch point or a deliverable, so that our counterparts can plan their workflow accordingly.
3. Ongoing adjustment
Once the project starts, the team velocity might fluctuate, and the scope of work might change. Therefore an routine reassessment and ongoing adjustment is required in order to keep the assessment up to date.
4. Milestone review
Usually when a key milestone is reached, there will be some sort of the post milestone assessment. These assessment are important indicator of the project direction and the effectiveness of current approach. Therefore, feed those information back to the existing process, and reshape the project direction and corresponding effort is important to ensure we “learn fast and learn often”.
5. Significant ad hoc changes
Sometimes, there are other ad hoc changes that’s significant enough for us to re-evaluate our current approach. It could be change of organization, team member on/off boarding, key stakeholder feedback, project direction pivot, or other project takes higher priority, etc. In order to ensure the team agility, an ad hoc effort re-assessment is a helpful way to provide transparency to the team and make sure we’re all aligned.
Ways to Evaluate Effort
Goal >> Strategy >> Task
Before we evaluate the effort of any specific tasks, the important factor to understand the strategy and goal behind it. Once we get that level of understanding, it’s easier for us to understand how these tasks fit into the scope, and it helps us breakdown the tasks in a logical way. For example, when we’re asked to design a messaging feature within an existing e-commerce website, we might want to ask, how does it fit into the grand strategy? What are the business values and user values? By understanding the ecosystem and how the feature could potentially interact with users, we can generate more accurate assessment of the required effort.
Match talents to tasks
One of the success criteria of effort assessment is that the assessment is optimized by matching the right talent to the right task. It wouldn’t make sense to force someone to do something they’re neither good at nor interested in. Therefore, before actually evaluate the level of effort, it’s important to make sure we have the right talent maps to the right task. Sometimes we don’t have the luxury of a perfect mapping, or there are some some glorious tasks everyone wants and not-so-attractive one that’s required by nobody wants to pickup. This scenario is a good challenge for the Creative PM to solve, with interpersonal skills and leadership skills.
Balance between crowdsourcing vs. direct order
Once we have all the required talents in place, depending on the scale and general timeline of the project, we might need to determine whether we want to invite the creative team to be part of the assessment process. The good thing about having the team involved is that they gain ownership by voicing their opinions and own the decisions and responsibility. On the flip side, this process can take longer if team members can’t agree on who’s doing what.
On the other hand, if it’s a short term project, and you’ve gained trust with your team, we can start a quick assessment process ourselves and socialize it to the team afterwards to get feedback. Even if it doesn’t satisfy everyone, people can live with your decision given the impact is in a smaller scale.
Method 1: T-Shirt Sizing
The name “T-shirt” sort of explains how it works. Basically the effort assessment results will be presented in the format of small, medium, and large (or even extra small, extra large). The goal of T-Shirt Sizing is to provide: 1) the rough contrast between larger and smaller tasks, and 2) the high level idea of the accumulated effort across all the tasks. This technique is especially useful for mid/long term project planning when we don’t have all the details for accurate task-level planning.
Like all the effort assessment process, it’s important to define the minimum unit of the effort. For example, when we say this task is considered XS size, what do we mean by that? Does it mean a junior designer’s half-week worth of work? Once we’re settled with the definition of the sizes, it’s easier for us to actually engage in the assessment process.
Method 2: PERT
As a commonly used effort assessment system, PERT estimate (also called 3 point estimate) helps team to picture different scenarios when handling a tasks, therefore provide a more likely estimate that won’t be too far from what might happen in the project delivery. Basically, the team has to consider the effort level of a task in 3 scenarios: 1) Optimistic Estimate (no issue/blocker); 2) Most Likely Estimate; 3) Pessimistic Estimate (but not extremely unlikely). Once we have the estimate of these 3 scenarios, we can use the PERT estimate formula as below:
For example, if a task is estimated as 5-day effort as Optimistic, 10 days as Most Likely, and 15 days as Pessimistic, the PERT estimate would be:
(5 + 4 x 10+ 15)/6 = 10 days ( equals 2 work-week)
Method 3: Planning Poker
If you decided to use the crowd-sourcing method, Planning Poker is a fun way to help teams evaluate effort on each task. Planning Poker is basically using a deck of specialized cards with a Fibonacci number (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13…) on each card. The way to run a Planning Poker is as the video tutorial as below:
The benefit of running a Planning Poker are 3 folds:
- as mentioned before, crowdsourcing creates ownership and responsibility, which usually have positive impact on the performance;
- it’s a fun exercise and everyone’s voice will be “heard”;
- through the discussion, we can discuss the potential difficulties and unhappy path, so that the team is more prepared before they take on those tasks.
Conclusion
- Effort assessment is key to project planning and scope/ timeline/ expectation management;
- Not only we need upfront effort assessment, ongoing adjustment is really the important piece to enhance the team agility;
- There are many different methods to choose from when estimating the effort level; if times allow, involving team members in the process help build ownership, responsibility, transparency, and better culture.
What are some other methods/ tips you know about effort assessment? Which one is your favorite, and why? I’m eager to hear from you.
ABC. Always be clappin’.
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The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author. They do not represent current or previous client or employer views.
