A friend shared with me a few stories about how Estimates are destroying value in his organization. He was kind enough to allow me to share these stories anonymously. Enjoy the reading, I know I did! 🙂 The story of the customer that wanted software, but got the wrong estimates instead Once, one of our …
When I started my career as a Project Manager, I too was convinced that following a plan was a mandatory requirement for project success. As I tried to manage my first projects, my emphasis was on making sure that the plan was known, understood and then followed by everyone involved. When I started my career …
Organizations go through different levels of maturity as they grow. Some will say that they “learn to perform”, others will say that they “become ossified and slow”, yet others would say that they “mature”. In my view neither of these classifications is accurate, they all touch on possible outcomes of a process of “aging”. Organizations …
As he looked at numbers e noticed that the oscillations of his model did not repeat. In fact he entered the numbers again, and again, and again but his model would refuse to behave the same way twice. During our long education we were taught that given the initial state of a system (the present …
Every time a software project is started, a dance starts: the dance of project approval. Decision makers and project delivery team take different positions at a table, some ask questions, others do their best to respond, given that these questions are typically about the future. Some of the questions are so much into the future …
Why do I use #NoEstimates? Certainly the first reason is obvious in the name of this movement. But there are may other reasons. One of the reasons that does not get enough airtime is that it creates more options than using pre-estimated methods to manage software projects. Value is unpredictable, generate options to explore the …
One of the questions (Part I, Part II) that emerged from the #NoEstimatesQuestions discussion on twitter was: “How do I choose between options or opportunities (without having estimates regarding the cost)?” The thinking goes: I can spend some time doing A or B, but which should I do first? To answer this question we can …
Last week we did not cover all the questions on #NoEstimates. Twitter gave us a lot more questions than could be listed last week, and even more interesting ones. Read on for the questions and my take on their meaning. How do I choose between options or opportunities (without having estimates regarding the cost)? Choices …
