I had an interesting incident while working with one of the organizations. One of the project managers was very happy the way his team was performing. When he came to me, he said, “My team is doing really good these days. They started with a lot of features in gone few sprints and their estimates really worked well delivering the outcomes. The team’s efficiency and productivity increased a lot due to correct estimates.”
It’s hard for me to believe that the team’s productivity has something to do with those estimates. I believe that there was something else and more going on with the team because I have known only one thing all these years – Software Engineers (or for that matter humans in general) are very bad at estimates!
When I tried to dig deeper, he told me that as the team was estimating, it ran out of time (to complete all the sprint backlog items) and ended up having less time for all the work to be completed in a given sprint – which resulted in breaking down (“slicing”) the stories.
He agreed that “slicing” of stories was essential to the success of the project his team was delivering. In all the sprints he mentioned, after starting with a huge number of things on the team’s plate, the team reduced the scope and prioritized it which of course resulted in a slimmed-down product that could be done with the time available for the team. The sliced product was better and more manageable than the original plan.
Scope reduction and prioritizing was essential to achieve this result.
Let’s look at the definition of Prioritization – ” Prioritization is the activity that arranges items or activities in order of importance relative to each other.”
And let’s look at the definition of Estimation – ” Estimation is the process of finding an estimate, or approximation, which is a value that is usable for some purpose even if input data may be incomplete, uncertain, or unstable.“
As we can make out, the definitions themselves speak volume about the two. I believe order of importance relative to each other is quite easy to understand than an approximation with incomplete, uncertain or unstable data!
So do you think estimation was the reason behind the success for my friend’s team? I don’t believe so. Certainly the team did estimation (as everyone does) and they did take a few days from their project. I don’t object to the estimation on the basis of cost or waste. I believe that estimation, though it was going on, was not an essential cause of the good outcome the team was able to achieve.
Scope reduction and prioritizing were necessary to the team’s success. Estimating and feeling scarcity were not at all responsible our supporting the outcomes in any way. Reducing scope to the highest value items and doing those first was essential. Nothing else was!
Many leaders make the mistake of optimizing flow and efficiency without focusing on value; they create teams that are highly efficient… at building the wrong thing. You can focus on value by clearly and efficiently prioritizing your work. Estimates won’t do anything good unless you know your priorities.
At the end of the day, your job isn’t to get the estimation correct — your job is to change the world.
Anand D.
