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You estimate your work, don’t you?
Are you and your team consistently missing the mark?
That’s a strong signal that something is amiss. And I don’t mean your estimation ability.
Sure, everybody messes up an estimate every now and then. That’s in an estimate’s nature, after all: we don’t know the correct answer, so we’re literally making an educated guess.
But I know of organisations where mis-estimates are just totally the norm.
If that’s the case, bad estimates are a symptom of an organisation struggling to be in control of their work (and bad estimates compound that problem of course).
There’s clearly something underlying.
- lack of clarity (in the requirements, in the technical foundations)
- unplanned work (firefighting, changing priorities or tasks)
- unplannable work (bugs, incidents)
- difficulties with dependencies (difficult communication with sibling departments or suppliers)
- accurate (long) estimates are politically unacceptable
In such situations, demanding better estimates will lead you nowhere.
Estimates, by their nature, are non-negotiable: they’re the best guess we can come up with given the incomplete information we have.
So, stomping your foot and demanding improved estimates will have no effect. Well, none other than the engineers padding their estimates like mad.
Instead, if you improve the underlying issues, the estimates will “magically” improve.
- transform unplanned work into planned work, make it visible and itself estimable
- make unplanned work go away (even better!)
- strive for more clarity, e.g. through plainly putting in more work during planning, or organisational approaches (better definition of ready, perhaps?)
- focussing on and shifting quality left, so unplannable work doesn’t arise
- figure out better visibility and communication with your dependencies
- change culture to accept estimates (remember, they’re non-negotiable anyway)
I know many items on this list are easier said than done, particularly the last – but what’s the alternative? Crystal balls?