Seems there is a seminal moment in the #NoEstimates conversation. The spectrum of questions - without a lot of answers yet - comes down to two ends of the spectrum
- I give you a fixed budget and you tell me what I can get for that budget in terms of MVP (minimally viable product)
- I tell you what set of MVP's I need to go to market and you tell me when you'll have those done.
The spectrum in between needs to land on one of these for this very simple reason.
It's not about the developers wanting or not wanting to do estimates. It's not about exploring new ways or pretending you're Yoda and asking inverted logic questions or blocking people when you don't like the tough questions NOT being answered.
So it's this
The customer has a finite amount of money. The customer has a need date. Both of these should have a range of values and a confidence interval on those values. The conversation goes something like this
I need these MVP's - more or less - on or before this date - more or less. Let's see if I can get some sense of that that is going to cost, so I can make some decisions about if those are viable dates and viable sets of MVPs.
That is I need to make decisions about how I am going to spend the money I've been given for this project or go back and get more money and relieve on the need date.
In the end it's all about making decisions. Not the decisions made by the developers - that comes later. But the business decisions about the project. About the cost and scehdule of the project. About the needed capabilties produced by the project. About the business value delivered by those capabilities.
And in the end all business decisions land on money and time - much and when?
So how can I make a decision about my project if I don't know:
- How much it is going to cost,
- When it is going to done, and
- What MVPs I'm going to get at the end of the money and time?
or some combination of those three. Without knowing something about the time and cost, the business owner - the owner of the money - will have a hard time making decisions about the value. When this value will be available, and most importantly about when the produced capabilties will deliver that value.
All the gnashing of teeth about #NoEstimates MUST be able to answer those questions if there it is going to be interesting to those of use tasked with managing the spending of other people’s money. All other conversation topics are moot until there is some viable explanation of how #NE supports in some way, anyway, progress toward answering those questions.
