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Ah, so I guess he'd approve of the way I stumbled through university :) I get what he's saying, but I can't imagine adhering strictly to this would be healthy.

by zo7 10y ago

Ah, so I guess he'd approve of the way I stumbled through university :) I get what he's saying, but I can't imagine adhering strictly to this would be healthy. I've waited until the last minute to finish enough projects to know how stressful and anxiety-inducing it can be, and have enough experience to know that my time estimates are never accurate.

tychoman 10y ago
My experience has shown that this is actually a much less stressful way to work. You're asking ppl to give estimates, with the caveat that there will be no penalty for not hitting it. Because all overruns will be absorbed in the common pool of safety margin, the buffer. This removes all the politics from estimating - the grandstanding, the making others look bad, the not-so-subtle pressures, the over-inflating to avoid looking bad. Estimates become what they're supposed to be: just estimates. Also, notice that as hard as everyone says estimating is, they know EXACTLY when to start on that thing they're procrastinating on to finish it just before the deadline. Could it be this interesting phenomenon is a feature, not a bug?
SZJX 10y ago
I think the caveat is obvious here, that this is a method that applies to organizations with the help of a lot of formal methodologies, not individuals. For individual endeavors, it's always the right idea to start as early as possible, since without all the formal methodologies and structural control your estimate will always be literal laughing stock. Starting at the last moment is the absolute thing not to do for an individual who has no clear idea/experience about project management on her own(95% of people really). Not to mention another issue deadly enough on its own is that there's simply nobody supervising a hard deadline for your own projects, unlike within a company structure. If you do so, just wait for series of trainwreck to happen to you. I think this is proven by countless examples and experience already and nobody would really object to that.

by zo7 10y ago

tychoman 10y ago

My experience has shown that this is actually a much less stressful way to work. You're asking ppl to give estimates, with the caveat that there will be no penalty for not hitting it. Because all overruns will be absorbed in the common pool of safety margin, the buffer. This removes all the politics from estimating - the grandstanding, the making others look bad, the not-so-subtle pressures, the over-inflating to avoid looking bad. Estimates become what they're supposed to be: just estimates. Also, notice that as hard as everyone says estimating is, they know EXACTLY when to start on that thing they're procrastinating on to finish it just before the deadline. Could it be this interesting phenomenon is a feature, not a bug?

SZJX 10y ago

I think the caveat is obvious here, that this is a method that applies to organizations with the help of a lot of formal methodologies, not individuals. For individual endeavors, it's always the right idea to start as early as possible, since without all the formal methodologies and structural control your estimate will always be literal laughing stock. Starting at the last moment is the absolute thing not to do for an individual who has no clear idea/experience about project management on her own(95% of people really). Not to mention another issue deadly enough on its own is that there's simply nobody supervising a hard deadline for your own projects, unlike within a company structure. If you do so, just wait for series of trainwreck to happen to you. I think this is proven by countless examples and experience already and nobody would really object to that.