The plan is, the plan will change

End of the road

A precise plan produces an intricate list of tasks, often estimated to the day or half day, that will fall apart as soon as it is introduced to the real world, because no precise plan I have seen ever has a task for “the framework I’m using doesn’t support a command that updates 2 Business Objects” or “Investigate a fix for that NHibernate GROUP BY bug”. It cannot be precise about the known unknowns, unless you accept that in knowing them, the plan becomes void. Furthermore, it cannot include the unknown unknowns, because then they wouldn’t be unknown. If you minimise the detail in those areas, estimates will expand to cover the risk. Unknowns should be big and scary. It’s better to say it’s 1000 miles to walk from Glasgow to Dunnet Head and revise your estimate down as you see detail of the roads, than start by saying it’s 100 miles because you didn’t see the mountains and lochs in the way.

Estimates for project management

“Ah,” says the reader, “but aren’t you misrepresenting the value of estimates and planning? We don’t care that the plan is going to change, so long as the Project Manager can work out how much it has changed, so that they can feed that into change control”.

It sounds fair, if the variation is caused by a customer who understands the plan and accepts the variation. If the customer expects us to know the details of every library we choose better than they do, or expects us to work with Supplier X no matter what format they use, it’s a harder call to make.

When I compress a plan to be the best guess set of tasks-to-complete, estimated down to the hour, I end up vacuum-packing and squeezing out the contingency directly into the project, and leaving myself, as the lead, no room to manoeuvre when we inevitably have to deal with something that isn’t on that list.

Estimates for risk

This is different from the general project contingency that every Project Manager adds to ensure there is breathing space in the estimates. Developer contingency anchors in the risk surrounding the tasks, and has to be estimated at a technical level, and has to carry itself alongside the tasks that present the risk. If there is no opportunity to address the risk during the appropriate development cycle, and possibly to fail and restart the task in extreme cases, then the feedback loop will be longer, and any problems will be harder to fix, and the delivery itself will be put at risk.

If the plan is complete, it has to accept variability, and greater vagueness. I can expect that a web service request will involve 1 authentication call and 1 search request, but if I see there is a risk with a reasonable chance of being realised, that I will need more calls, and to write a custom web service handler, I need the plan to accommodate that risk, and as a Technical Lead, the breakdown and the estimates are the place I can control that risk. If my estimates include the risk, which I cannot be as precise about, then I am in a much better position to say that half my estimates will be too low, and half will be too high, rather than defaulting to the optimist whose estimates have an 80% chance of being too low.

The less contingency I put in, replaced by details, the more likely it is that the plan will drift rightwards. When it does, I need to re-estimate, and I want to know where my fixed points are, the details that I’ve worked out and can’t be changed, whether that’s the deadline, a specific web service, or the work already in progress. The road less known is the road less estimated, and that where the scope is dynamic, where work can be moved, re-estimated, broken down, and negotiated.

Further watching

Why is Scrum So Hard?