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Perhaps you needed some work done in your kitchen, and asked two different contractors. Actually, imagine a time when you asked for an estimate on work that you needed done. If you're still not convinced, put yourself in the shoes of the person asking for the work. Slow down then, ask questions, understand better, speed up again. Pay attention to the signs that tell you that you're going too fast. Instead I want us to move fast, but not so fast that the wheels are coming off. Minimizing those conversations, means minimizing understanding, and therefore increasing the risk. This is why we are a team, not just a group of engineers. This is an opportunity to clarify what's being asked.
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When the team disagrees, I want to jump on it both feet. 5 or 8 and someone is going to tell me that I'm over complicating things. Middle of the road type of thing.ġ or 2 and someone is going to remind me that I'm missing too many details. This is often a sign that the team members have figured out an estimate that will minimize conversations. When coaching teams, which I do once in a while, I consider frequent initial agreement on the work estimate as a red flag, especially when the estimates default to "average size" (say, "3"). This is us understanding it and even designing the solution already! I want to cherish these moments, savor them, keep referring back to them as the team's a-ha moments. To identify those signals that tell us that perhaps we missed something about the work, and we'd better have a quick conversation. This is the very core of estimating as a team. "wait a minute! what are we building again!?" In cases like this, would you go with the larger estimate when the range is so wide, or would you say "wait a minute! where are we going again!?" And you thought we were talking about that Japanese restaurant next town, And it's rush hour. I was thinking we would be walking to the Thai restaurant at the end of the street. You however think it's more like a 30 minute drive, and we'd better hurry. I can finish a couple of things before we leave. We're planning for lunch, and from what I think I heard, it's a 5-minute walk to get to the restaurant. The more the team disagrees, the more efficient we need to be at resolving it, so we go with the largest estimate. What to do when we often disagree? The tendency would be to insist on the easiest possible way to disambiguate. I'm really interested in solving for the general case. We can live with the ambiguity.once in a while. Then talk about it for a minute or two, and if there's still no consensus, pick one of the estimates and move on. Sometimes though the estimates are going to be largely different, and in that case I'd recommend more caution before tossing that coin.īeing pragmatic again, if the team is estimating a specific type of work that no one quite knows much about, then an initial strategy is to "spike it" (investigate). We have lots and lots of 2s and 3s and the law of averages will be in our favor. Some "3"s will really be "2"s and vice versa. For example, if the estimates are different but close enough.