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A Simpler Way to Estimate Projects and Work

Roger Mitchell |

Building on yesterday's discussion about how to estimate capacity, we're going to look at estimations for projects and work, which is the second component of our puzzle.

As a quick reminder from yesterday, we measure capacity in half-day or third-day blocks rather than hours, which is helpful in measuring our capacity.

But before we talk about how that applies to estimations, let's explore the three approaches that organizations typically use when estimating time:

  1. Hours: typically expressed as a (wide) range like 32 to 48 hours
  2. Story points: uses the Fibonacci sequence to assign a value like 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, etc
  3. T-shirt sizes: picking a size from XS to 3XL (although I'm sure someone has gone smaller or larger)

All of these are nonsensical.

  1. Hours create false precision around how work is estimated, and ranges are often treated as commitments instead of estimates
  2. Story points lead to confusion as each person with a team can assign a different value to the same piece of work, and teams have entirely different measures of productivity (e.g. A team ships 30 points on average and B team ships 60 points on average)
  3. T-shirt sizes lack relatability because there's no way to identify how many shirts of each size a person, team, or organization can wear at the same time (on top of the fact that metaphorically it makes no sense)

There's a simpler way to manage this that aligns better to how we think and work.

Instead of those approaches, use the same scale that we use to measure capacity to estimate your work, which is defined as two or three blocks per day.

While projects can easily take many blocks, the estimate for a single piece of work cannot be more than the number of blocks in a person's day.

Here's why:

  • It aligns to the natural rhythm of how long most people can focus on producing an output if they're not disrupted with emails, chats, meetings, etc
  • It reduces the likelihood of large deviations by forcing people to think in smaller chunks about their outputs like documentation, building features, training teams, etc
  • Varying estimates for the same piece of work is advantageous when you start to allocate work to people based on their capabilities and capacity

In practice, you'll end up with a list of work and estimates of partial or full days required to deliver an initiative, which is incredibly helpful when we start to allocate people to projects, the topic of tomorrow's newsletter.

TLDR: Estimate work with the same scale we use to measure capacity, which is in two or three blocks per day. Don't allow any piece of work to have more than number of blocks in a single day.

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