Defense against the dark art of estimation bargaining (2014)
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Defense against the dark art of estimation bargaining (2014)
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Re: Defense against the dark art of estimation bargaining (2014)
#2Sure, all of this is easy when working with good people and difficult when working with people who constantly lie both up and down the management hierarchy.
Essential I feel this stuff only works when results are a by product of earned trust from management on delivery. If there isn’t that trust built up people are likely to try to appease whoever is going to give them a raise.
Re: Defense against the dark art of estimation bargaining (2014)
#3> Bargain scope, not time
I've started applying this and it's amazing how well this works.
Of course sometimes it's just not possible to reduce the scope any further, but the key point is that the stakeholders just want something, anything and as soon as possible at that.
You give them that and suddenly there's much less pressure and you can focus on delivering the rest, or sometimes dropping it entirely because in hindsight it wasn't that important.
There's a similar phenomenon occuring when playing planning poker - often the estimate is not what anyone wanted, but the one that the most could agree on, which is usually way off. I thought of solving this by having a single transferable vote, but I hadn't had a chance to play planning poker for over a year now, so I have no data on its effectiveness.
Re: Defense against the dark art of estimation bargaining (2014)
#4An older IBM gentleman told me back in the eighties. 'Don't accept the invitation to fail.'
Re: Defense against the dark art of estimation bargaining (2014)
#5[deleted]
Re: Defense against the dark art of estimation bargaining (2014)
#6An older IBM gentleman told me back in the eighties. 'Don't accept the invitation to fail.'
Sometimes getting your foot in the door is all that counts, and you can renegotiate from there.
Way back, the company I worked for and this other company where bidding for a job. They wanted a lot of work done on a ridiculously short deadline (3-4 month), we said "can't be done", the other company said "sure". Anyway the other company completely failed to deliver on time, but since they already had the contract and had already started the work the company that hired them figured it was easier to just renegotiate an extension to the contract than replacing them. Long story short, the other company got a solid 18 month of good steady work out of their 'failure'.
Re: Defense against the dark art of estimation bargaining (2014)
#7> Bargain scope, not time I've started applying this and it's amazing how well this works. Of course sometimes it's just not possible to reduce the scope any further, but the key point is that the stakeholders just want something, anything and as soon as possible at that. You give them that and suddenly there's much less pressure and you can focus on delivering the rest, or sometimes dropping it entirely because in h…
"or sometimes dropping it entirely because in hindsight it wasn't that important." yes for that multiple times. usualy people want results without thinking about oportunity costs. and when you have multiple tasks and ask to sort them by priority you get the answer that everything is important.
Re: Defense against the dark art of estimation bargaining (2014)
#8Chapter 2 “saying no” of “the clean coder” book has the best treatment of this topic i’ve read. It’s just the most realistic based on my experience.
He also addresses the common push backs - e.g. “you don’t understand, i can’t say no in this position right now”
Re: Defense against the dark art of estimation bargaining (2014)
#9> Bargain scope, not time I've started applying this and it's amazing how well this works. Of course sometimes it's just not possible to reduce the scope any further, but the key point is that the stakeholders just want something, anything and as soon as possible at that. You give them that and suddenly there's much less pressure and you can focus on delivering the rest, or sometimes dropping it entirely because in h…
"or sometimes dropping it entirely because in hindsight it wasn't that important." yes for that multiple times. usualy people want results without thinking about oportunity costs. and when you have multiple tasks and ask to sort them by priority you get the answer that everything is important.
It somewhat sinister, because what we're doing is essentially pitting the stakeholders' past priorities against the current ones. But it's effective and I wish they were aware of this more.
One other trick I have up my sleeve is to do an, ahem, quick sort of tasks with the stakeholders. There's a degree of cunningness required to pull this off, but it works.
Hilariously enough insertion sort is less effective, because it's too obvious.
Re: Defense against the dark art of estimation bargaining (2014)
#10An older IBM gentleman told me back in the eighties. 'Don't accept the invitation to fail.'
Sometimes getting your foot in the door is all that counts, and you can renegotiate from there. Way back, the company I worked for and this other company where bidding for a job. They wanted a lot of work done on a ridiculously short deadline (3-4 month), we said "can't be done", the other company said "sure". Anyway the other company completely failed to deliver on time, but since they already had the contract and h…
> getting your foot in the door is all that counts
Keep in mind that the quote you're responding to was from an IBM old-timer.
That context, back then, was that IBM was well-past having its foot in the door and was walking around in all your business! There's wisdom in "not accepting an invitation to failure" in that context.
You're right though, estimation is all head-games, especially when bids are involved.