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Stakeholders will use your work product as part of some larger process. They need estimates so they can plan. They can't just turn on a dime when you say your f

Stakeholders will use your work product as part of some larger process. They need estimates so they can plan. They can't just turn on a dime when you say your finished.

AstralStorm 8y ago
That's not an estimate then, it is a commitment. If you break someone's plans it is often worse than not having planned at all. Unless the plan is extremely flexible... Agile. Then the plan barely matters so why make one at all? Have a detailed unordered playbook instead and potentially a guiding strategy. (sometimes a playbook is timed, that is less flexible than untimed conditional plays and generally shows that you lack information) In case the words are confusing, plan is on tactical level and related to day to day operations. A playbook is a set of small roughly sketched plays to be used when conditions are met. A play differs from a plan by level of detail and size. "Release by the end of June" is rarely a good plan, "release before competitor adds a similar feature" might be. The date is reifying unknown to look known but does not make it so, and if leaked helps your competition plan. Deployment can be done whenever and unlike development is often much more predictable. Likewise marketing. Usually the story is that the stakeholder is targeting some annual demo event and that gives a strict timeline. Any of your estimates is worthless and useless then, only tracking and feature set near the time of such event so that marketing can decide what to show and whether to show anything at all. And the marketing takes some time too, so the stakeholder probably wants to know how ready something is before launching that machine, but not too much before or they might overhype and burn. Trying to do it backwards, when the features are time boxed target generally goes poorly as the features get implemented in a checklist but not useful, usable or extensible matter. (Scrum results in this too.) Second type of "stakeholder" is a time minded investor. Again that is a commitment not an estimate, since it you do not provide a good enough product you will not get paid and probably fold. Then there's a combination of both when trying to outdo established competition with known upgrade patterns.

Stakeholders will use your work product as part of some larger process. They need estimates so they can plan. They can't just turn on a dime when you say your finished.

AstralStorm 8y ago

That's not an estimate then, it is a commitment. If you break someone's plans it is often worse than not having planned at all. Unless the plan is extremely flexible... Agile. Then the plan barely matters so why make one at all? Have a detailed unordered playbook instead and potentially a guiding strategy. (sometimes a playbook is timed, that is less flexible than untimed conditional plays and generally shows that you lack information) In case the words are confusing, plan is on tactical level and related to day to day operations. A playbook is a set of small roughly sketched plays to be used when conditions are met. A play differs from a plan by level of detail and size. "Release by the end of June" is rarely a good plan, "release before competitor adds a similar feature" might be. The date is reifying unknown to look known but does not make it so, and if leaked helps your competition plan. Deployment can be done whenever and unlike development is often much more predictable. Likewise marketing. Usually the story is that the stakeholder is targeting some annual demo event and that gives a strict timeline. Any of your estimates is worthless and useless then, only tracking and feature set near the time of such event so that marketing can decide what to show and whether to show anything at all. And the marketing takes some time too, so the stakeholder probably wants to know how ready something is before launching that machine, but not too much before or they might overhype and burn. Trying to do it backwards, when the features are time boxed target generally goes poorly as the features get implemented in a checklist but not useful, usable or extensible matter. (Scrum results in this too.) Second type of "stakeholder" is a time minded investor. Again that is a commitment not an estimate, since it you do not provide a good enough product you will not get paid and probably fold. Then there's a combination of both when trying to outdo established competition with known upgrade patterns.