Pick what battles are worth fighting for!

Trying to perfect the ability to predict is definitely a futile exercise.

The more you try to prevent getting bad at predicting, the more you will guarantee to get bad at adapting.

When you do complex work, you can’t solve the problem of being unable to predict how much effort something represents perfectly.

Having said that, you can solve the inability to adapt.

The solution is simple: don’t push in work at the beginning of the Sprint. Pull in work gradually.

Let the reality of the work and your actual capacity dictate how much work you pull in instead of letting the inaccuracy of your capacity and work estimates dictate how much work you push in.

How do you do that? It’s pretty simple:

1.Set a reasonable Sprint Goal.

2.The Sprint is flexible. Drag in more work as necessary and is possible based on the reality of your situation.

Begin with humble plans that evolve as you encounter reality.

No need for any fancy capacity calculations, because you’re not and you cannot commit based on your Sprint’s capacity.

3.Instead of pushing in work based on capacity, pull in work based on the flow of work.

As long as you actively manage your flow, your available capacity will be taken into account.

As long as you manage your flow and throughput, you will make the most progress possible, even if you don’t achieve your Sprint Goal in the end.

Adapt to reality at a time when you have the best information at your disposal about your situation instead of blindly expecting your inability to predict your capacity and workload before Sprint even starts to save you from over-committing during Sprint Planning.

Don’t worry so much about the failure to predict because that’s going to happen anyway.

Worry about the failure to adapt as reality unfolds and presents itself, as that’s where the biggest gains can be made.