The #NoEstimates discussion seems to be stuck on exploring and questioning everything. To my sensibility, this is called taking out your brain and playing with it. Nothing really actionable, lots of go look for dysfunction, lots of restating the obvious - don't do wasteful things. Really I never would have thought of that.
Here's a process loop that has served me well for a long time. This is from Statistics for Experimenters, Design, Innovation, and Discovery, George E. P. Box, J. Stuart Hunter, and William G. Hunter, 2005. The first edition is 1978, so these ideas have been around a long time.
With the search for dysfunction and challenging everything approach (which by the way is trivially easy compared to actually making the improvements. It's like pointing out "you're fat," but not actually having any advice on how to lose weight), the next step is to deduce what the root cause is. And the root cause to NOT estimates, it's bad estimating processes that produce bad estimates, used by Bad managers.
With data and facts and a domain and context, the corrective actions to improve the probability of project success can be assessed. In the end it's this probability of success that must be the source of all we do in the project management business.
So here's the final set of questions for anyone suggesting improvements needed to increase the probability of success:
- Can the business owner understand the commitment needed to receive the value from the project that is using #NE or any form of estimating or not estimating
- For the project manager, some type of answer, any answer will do to the question what will this cost at the end and along the way and when are you planning to be done. These answers of course have to be probabilistic answers.
- We use the phrases we plan to be done on or before the 3rd week in November, 2015 with an 80% confidence
- We plan to come in at $560M or below with a 75% confidence
- Conversations like this are what business people like to have. And since the business people - the Program Manager, the Director of IT, the field operations manager - have other managers asking them these questions, any suggested improvements to the discovered dysfunction need to provide some form of an answer. One that is actionable in some sense to move foreward.
- If the corrective action to the dysfunction can't, doesn't, or simply refuses to provide this answer, I'd conjecture those paying the bills will have little interest in the idea as the source of that corrective action.
