There is an immutable set of questions that need answers before we can determine the probability of success for our project.
- How much is this project going to cost when we are done?
- How long is it going to take to deliver all the promised outcomes from the project?
- How many people do we need to get the deliverable out the door for the estimated cost and estimated completion date?
- What is going to cause our project to get in trouble?
- How can we assure we are actually making progress in some way meaningful to the people funding the project?
These are fundamental questions for any project. By any project, I mean any time bounded, cost bounded effort to produce something new, needs to have some credible answers to these questions if you are spending someone elses money.
Spending your own money? No one cares. But spending other peoples money means you have an obligation to behave accordingly. So it all comes down to this.
When there is a suggestion of how to answer these questions, or even how to ignore the question, ask yourself this:
- Does this pass the smell test? That is does this even sound logical. No Estimates is one of those.
- What is the domain and context of the suggestion? When soemone says the domain is software, what software. A 5 week internal project or building the flight avionics suite for Raptor.
- Has the suggested approach been shown to improve the probability of success for the project? Was this improvement correlated with the success or was it the cause of the succcess. Many times there is correlation but no causality.
