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How to treat estimates is hugely dependent on the political situation at your company. Things such as, exactly what is your role, the role of the person asking,
by ufmace 9y ago
How to treat estimates is hugely dependent on the political situation at your company. Things such as, exactly what is your role, the role of the person asking, your relationship and their expectations, what will they use the information for? That plus the technical side of how many unknowns are involved in doing this thing, and how long it has taken to resolve similar types of unknown in the past.
Maybe the most important thing to remember is to beware of keeping your old behavior with regard to estimating things when there's a sudden change in the management structure. You may go from someone who understands development and knows how to interpret and present a good-faith estimate from developers to higher ups, to someone who just presents your estimates up the chain verbatim. And that shift may not be obvious to the developer until the fallout from a bad estimate gets blamed on you.
- rangersanger 9y agoThis. This is one of the reasons I left my last PM job. I was being told to spend less time with the team and more time on the road with clients. I don't know what the right ratio is, but I do know that my rapport with the team and deep familiarity with the stories/tasks led to pretty solid estimates. Also knowing the patterns of the dev lead helped a lot, he was a chronic underestimater so I'd do my best to push him to consider things like coordination, legacy, etc. Personality of the estimator plays a huge part and the voltile/stable essay was a great shortcut for understanding this. A voltile will hit the estimate or beat it. It'll be cowboy all day long and god help the company if it needs to be maintained. I've had a few dev leads like this. They'll take the tricky bits and do it alone. At night. On the weekend. Half asleep. Then, there is the stable. They'll never hit their original estimate. The most egregious won't get beyond the proof of concept without some serious prodding. When the project is done, it's meticulous, but we rarely get to that point because of the daily 6 hour long discussions about naming...
- valuearb 9y agoPM = Project manager, or PM = Product Manager? If it's Project Manager, that's crazy.
- rangersanger 9y agoYes product- though we didn't have project management to speak of. So, both.
- valuearb 9y agoThose are two widely different roles in terms of day to day responsibilities and skill sets, which points to a very bad organizational structure.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- rangersanger 9y agoDepends on the context. Also, it was a smaller organization, gotta make due. We frequently delivered on time and on budget, so, I don't think we lost much with that structure.
- valuearb 9y agoI've worked in less than 10 person companies that split that role for a reason, it leads to far more effective development and better products. A project manager's key role is to save money on developers. It's a hugely cost efficient role when done well. A product manager's job is to ensure the product meets customer needs/requirements. Having them do menial tasks to remove roadblocks for developers is totally orthogonal to their most important tasks.
- ghaff 9y agoPolitical situation and also just context. Is it just an informational estimate for very rough planning purposes or is it going to be used as a promise to your largest customer?