On my way to a client in Toronto, the logo advertisment for CIBC said...
The future emerges
And since that future is rarely known in advance, the notion of Value in the future and the cost of producing that value came to me.
Value is what happnes to something when it it useful. Anything material or immaterial is of value only because it is useful for or to somebody.
Thr cost of this value is used to assess its usefulness. This is the affordability of value principle of Microeconomics. As well the affordability of the Better Buying Power initiatives in our domain. The Microeconomics principles askswhat is the lost opportunity cost of any decision made by spending - or not spending - a scarce resource to acquire something of value?
If this value and its cost are in the future, then there is uncertainty (reducible and irreducible) in both the Value and the Cost of that value. In the absence of estimates of the Value and the Cost, decisions about choices between alternatives can not be informed.
The notion of making decisions about future outcomes, based onValue and the Cost of that value without estimating the cost, risk, and produced value violates the principle of decision making in the presence of scarce resources - time, money, talent.
So when we hear there are...
- Decision making framework for project that do not require estimates
- Investment models for software projects that do not require estimates
- Project management approaches using risk management, scope management, and progress reporting that do not require estimates
- Ways toProve that estimates are not needed
Then ask some hard questions of how the principles of microeconomics of software development can be set aside, and demand tangible evidence showing these conjectures are actually possible in any development domain where the future emerges while spending other peoples money.
