Teach this to your manager: At the beginning of a task, uncertainty is highest. Under no circumstances should you give an estimate in ‘man-hours’. Even days is too precise. The first estimate should be in months or years (of course depending on the size of the project). Then, as your insight into the project grows, you refine that to months, then weeks, later days. A vague estimate with a lower and a higher bound is way more useful to your manager than a ridiculously ‘precise’ but highly speculative number.
This lesson was brought to you by either “Code Complete 2” or “Rapid Development” by Steve McConnel, and by my former manager who wanted projects estimated in minutes.
Not if your manager then takes the minimum of your estimate.
I don’t work for a while anymore.
I usually say what unit of measurement we’re counting in: days, weeks or months. For more detail, more specs are needed.
Don’t forget to add padding, so I’d just round it out to 18 months to be safe.
A good project manager doubles your number an adds 20% anyway.
Triples it if you are working more than one project.!
A typical project manager will get a range, take the lower bound and communicate it as the only relevant number to every other stakeholder. When that inevitably does not work out, all the blame will be passed on to you unfiltered.
Depending on where you work it may or may not be worth giving someone new the benefit of the doubt, but in general it is safer to only ever talk about the upper bound and add some padding.
I have a friend who’s a new PM (in scaled agile). He isn’t up on expectation management.
We have a process where we request data from another agency which takes “from 7 seconds to 12 days”
And of course he tells people that. And of course they hear “7 seconds”
I have told him that if the SLA is 12 days, say “less than 12 days”
My teams new hire project manager was even more advanced. When they found out we were working on 5-10 projects at once with no PM, they quit.
We had 3 PMs when I started here, and have been down to 0-1 for 6 months. That 0-1 runs a whole unrelated team, but is technical still a PM.
Dysfunction is fun. The plus side? No one asks me for estimates.
this is my number one thing I hate. So we are going to be converting over one system to another and you have no ideas what issues will pop up. give an estimation on the project. or like estimation onf fixing a bug or doing something you think the software can do but your not real sure till you look into it.
The known unknowns and especially the unknown unknowns never get factored into an estimate. People only ever think about the happy path, if everything goes right. But that rarely every happens so estimates are always widely off.
The book How Big Things Get Done describes a much better way to factor in everything without knowing all the unknowns though - Just look a previous similar projects and look how long they took, take the average and bounds then adjust up or down if you have good reason to do so. Your project will very likely take a similar amount of time if your samples are similar in nature to your current task. And the actual time already factors in all the issues and problems encountered and even if you don’t hit all the same issues your problems will likely take a similar amount of time. And the more previous examples you have the better these estimates get.
But instead of that we just pluck numbers out of the air and wonder why we never hit them.
yeah I have literally had something where I list off a bunch of problmatic stuff and how it could be some high side and then follow up or everything could go swimmingly which never happens and we could have this low side and they are like ok so the low side. no. no. that is not what im saying.
It makes me happy to see the good place memes.
