Estimation — the key to shared understanding

The Agile style of working can be a mixed bag for delivery teams. Over the pandemic, certain aspects have proved tricky to navigate. We sat down with Denise and Andrew from iTech Media’s delivery chapter to hear about their biggest challenge — and how they overcame it.

Written by Denise Liu and Andrew Carberry

We work in a tribe of 29 people, spread across 5 different time zones, and (thanks to the pandemic) are all remote. As delivery leads at an Agile company, our biggest challenge was figuring out how estimation would work for us.

The team had trialed estimation before, but that was with fewer people most of who were working in the office. The main issue was that it didn’t solve the problems we were experiencing. Work rolling over from sprint to sprint, scope creep as a result of not really understanding what needed to be done, people in different time zones working in separate groups.

We often heard “We don’t know how we can estimate what other chapters need to do.”. The team had grown and matured. It was time to give estimation another try.

One of our goals was collaboration, so we spoke to other team members and heard about their passion for estimation. We needed to get people involved to help us tell the story of the impact that estimation has.

We agreed very early on, we wanted to avoid estimating work in hours — for a couple of reasons:

1. Humans are awful at estimating absolute values
2. Often, estimates in hours (or days) are immediately taken as commitments, and questions get asked when e.g. a story is 2 days over the estimate. Many teams are put off estimation entirely because of the way their managers can misuse it.

Laying the groundwork

To get the team on board with this idea, we needed to change their thinking, so we decided to run a workshop. A week before, the teams were given some fun prep work to get them thinking about estimation. Every person received:

1. A set of blank playing cards
2. A pack of sharpies

And off they went to design one side of their planning poker cards so they could use these to estimate during the workshop. The creativity on some of these cards was amazing!

The prep didn’t end there! They were set a 5-day challenge to estimate everyday items and tasks, for example:

• How long it took to make coffee, or prepare a meal
• The height of their work chair
• The number of steps to the car nearest their house

This highlighted how bad we all are at estimating things accurately!

Today’s the day

Before we jumped into the theory of estimation, we wanted to establish a starting point. We asked the tribe “How confident are you with estimation?” Around 60% of the team were not familiar with it but were keen to learn how it could help us.

We wanted the team to experience estimation first-hand, so kept the theory side brief before getting stuck into the practical work.

First off, we split the tribe into three teams. We got them to estimate dogs — the perfect way to make the session fun and engaging. The teams discussed the weight of different dogs but struggled to agree on the size. Here are the results:

The estimates varied wildly! Is it a miniature dachshund, or a full-size one? We reiterated how hard it is to accurately estimate in absolute values. We then asked them to give the dogs t-shirt sizes relative to each other. This was much easier.

Next, they got started with story points. They were estimating relative sizes of vehicles, and related t-shirt sizes to story points on a scale. Story points are often scary because they come across as completely arbitrary. By linking story points to t-shirt sizes, it gave the team an anchor in the real world without relying on time.

Then we discussed what we learned from the examples of everyday work — how long did it take to make a coffee etc. This encouraged a discussion around effort and complexity. We intentionally included some tasks that were too big to complete in a sprint. Thankfully, the teams were having the types of conversations we had hoped for.

Finally, we went back to the original check-in question: “How confident are you with estimation?” Around 70% now felt fully onboard with estimation. RESULT!

Onwards and upwards

Since the workshop, squads have taken estimation into their planning sessions and we are already seeing massive improvements. They’re asking questions about the requirements and sharing their learnings. Time zones and language barriers have often made planning difficult, but every team member is contributing more since our workshop.

We are challenging where work is too big and collaborating on work more than ever before. Introducing Agile practices in a distributed team is not too different than if we were all together. The team has to feel engaged and buy into what we are doing. While it is still early days, we’re confident that the power of estimation will move us further along our journey to increased autonomy, ownership, and a desire to deliver greatness.

Interested in a career at iTech Media? Take a look at our open positions here.