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A company I was at 20 years ago did a variation of this for software estimation. It resulted in some good discussions. It wasn't anonymous as mentioned here. W
by slindsey 6y ago
A company I was at 20 years ago did a variation of this for software estimation. It resulted in some good discussions. It wasn't anonymous as mentioned here.
When one person on the team says an element will take one week and another says 8 weeks, there are fundamental differences in assumptions that need to be worked out. That was the good part of the process. The bad was when the Project Manager doesn't let the process play out and simply takes the shortest of the available estimates.
- leetrout 6y agoSounds like an unstructured planning poker?
- andrewem 6y agoIt’s wideband Delphi, which predates planning poker by several decades. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wideband_delphi https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wideband_delphi Edit: as I recall from doing estimating using wideband Delphi circa 2004, the main differences with planning poker as I see it practiced today are that estimates were in real time like days or weeks, and votes were collected and displayed anonymously, though as you would expect there was temptation for people to de-anonymize their own votes.
- leetrout 6y agoAh interesting! Thanks for the link. Everything old is new and the cycle continues.
- sergiotapia 6y agoThat's just planning poker.
- faichai 6y agoThis triggered my PTSD with regards to project managers. People whine about agile and scrum etc. but what they don’t realise is that the biggest benefit of those processes was that they replaced project management led, waterfall based processes. Waterfall failed for many reasons, but one of them was because you’d get asshole project managers constantly taking minimal estimates exactly as you describe and then applying pressure on individual devs when they overrun the minimum estimates. One of the biggest contributors to developer happiness and productivity over the last 20 years has been to escape this tyranny.
- specialist 6y agoProfessional project management (PMI) embraces critical path, iron triangle, risk management. Iteration was always The Correct Answer™. Kids today conflate "throw it over the wall" with waterfall. Agile rejects planning, foresight, vision, end goals. Agile was explicitly concocted to manage upwards, in those organizations unable or unwilling to do proper planning. Unfortunately, the originators wrote down their survival tips, which were then misunderstood by noobs and embraced by profiteers. Just like every other religious text. Agile is not the victory of iteration over some imagined dark ages of project chaos. The Agile Methodology is to argue about the Agile Methodology. The cult(ural) spread of Agile is no different than any other vacuous self-help omni-fix content-free dogma.
- projektfu 6y agoThe obvious response is that PMI is a cargo cult. I mean if we're straw-manning everything.
- specialist 6y agoThe more interesting question is: Why did Agile beat PMI? Because project management is not a critical success factor. Most projects are late, buggy, or outright failures. One response was to improve project management. That worked okay. But like with most knowledge work, requires some effort. Another response was to accept the failure rate and simply throw more resources at the problem. aka Worse is better.
- varjag 6y agoWorse is Better is something else altogether.
- Jtsummers 6y agoAgile does not reject those things. That’s just a nonsensical statement at best and a straw man at worst.
- markus_zhang 6y agoPM should always work with/as a business analyst to figure out the business requirements. A lot of times it is the ambiguity of business requirements that leads to bad decisions.