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Good take. Just want to add that the problem is “how long things will take” is always a guess when formulated as a single number or date and in reality somethin

Good take. Just want to add that the problem is “how long things will take” is always a guess when formulated as a single number or date and in reality something more like a probability distribution subject to many foreseen and unforeseen forces. That’s where the fundamental mismatch between corporate planning and Agile lies. Agile is supposed to be resilient to known and unknown unknowns, but corporate planning usually isn’t - as you mention due to very real constraints like cost and opportunity costs and so forth. It’s why you essentially can’t do “true-agile” in basically any corporate setting IMO.

tonyarkles 3y ago
Back when I was solo consulting and not inside the sausage factory I would provide cost ranges to clients who wanted fixed price (vs hourly). If they wanted a firm price they got the +3-sigma estimate. After doing that for a few years and successfully coming in within budget but not always on the timeline people were expecting I split it into separate estimate ranges for both cost and schedule. It took some time to really nail down how many billable hours there would actually be in a week, which is why cost and calendar had to be decoupled. I do still laugh about the fact that I could take a complex problem and break it down with hour estimates well enough to not end up being significantly over or under at the project level but then struggled really hard at figuring out how many hours there actually were in a day to put the calendar together. There’s always things that pop up that rob calendar time and virtually never things that free up calendar time.