Building Big — Guestimating work size.
The Challenge
Working on projects that span long periods of time often brings about the question
By when can this be done?
In fact, I would say this question comes up in most, if not all creative projects that require a series of actions to complete.
Answering this question reliably suddenly becomes a very important thing, because depending on how you answer it. Both to yourself and to others this question will dictate expectations like:
- How much work would it take to finish this?
- How much time be set aside when planning for this?
If these questions ever come up when approaching task then this article is for you.
A long long time ago
Here is a brief history of how this has been done in my field (software development), used to be that people took the requirements for a project then they planned it in it’s entirety, proceeded to break down the plans into sections they could estimate in hours add all the hours estimated for the work and boom you have a total estimate of the project and a bunch of other interesting ways that aren’t worth mentioning here. As time went by they started finding better and more accurate ways of estimating work.
Pearson’s Law
The method we are going to focus on today is derived from Pearson’s Law
When performance is measured, performance improves. When performance is measured and reported back, the rate of improvement accelerates. Pearson’s Law
How?
At Little Kidogo where we build tools for African Artisans here is what we do.
We work in Agile Sprints, these are fixed periods of time where we commit to finishing a particular amount of work by first planning for it, then working in the period ( for us this is two weeks) and finish of the process with a review.
Working in sprints enables us to apply the law above to how we work in the following ways.
- Since we work in periods of two weeks at a time this gives us an opportunity to measure and report our performance.
- Before embarking on any particular kind of work we will estimate it, for example, the engineering department uses t-shirt sizes to denote the size of the work expected.
- After finishing the work we record how long the work took us and compare it to the estimate we gave to the work this is done personally first then at the end of the sprint as a team during sprint retrospectives.
- Additionally, as we sprint we have daily stand up reports that serve as reviews that are ongoing with the sprint.
How do you keep your team improving?
Let us know in the comments below!
Back to discord 😜
