Why? Because there is no way that you are going to get estimation at a granular level correct at the beginning of a project. If you attempt to break an entire project into estimates at the beginning of the project, you are truly wasting weeks of your time. For a $1 million project or bigger, that’s inordinate. For a $100,000 project, that’s a lot of work.
#Is you need a budget safe software
Estimating breaks down a software project into granular, 1-to-3 day chunks. To minimize the risk of having your next technical project go awry, stop estimating and start budgeting.įor most strategic decisions, estimating is too precise. That’s a pretty high rate of failure for estimation. Do I need to buy a shovel so I can build a sandlot? Or do I need to raise $100 million dollars to build Yankee Stadium? Stakeholders have decisions to make and deserve to have an idea of what their investment is going to cost and if it’s worth pursing.Ī recent Harvard Business Review article revealed that one in six IT projects has a cost overrun of 200%. Here’s the thing: “How much is this ballpark going to cost?” is a fair question. The rest of us are taking a stab in the dark. If I ask you, “How much does it cost to build a ballpark?” only those of you who have first-hand experience building a ballpark can truly answer. Yet the truth is: It’s the responsibility of the technical team to answer the question “How much is this going to cost?” because technical teams are the ones that have the most relevant knowledge to answer it.
Technical teams don’t like the second answer, because estimating takes a ton of time and it’s often abused - stakeholders sometimes turn the “estimates” into maximums and get upset if the team exceeds them. Stakeholders and decision-makers don’t like the first reply because they desperately need an answer to their question and they don’t have the knowledge to answer it themselves. There are two common replies to this question: These are all variations on the same question - how much effort is this going to cost in terms of time and/or money? Maybe it’s been asked another way - How long will this take? How many stories can we get into this next sprint? How many people do we need to hire to get this done? How much money do I we need to raise? Nearly every software development project starts with one question: How much is this going to cost? Perhaps it’s a stakeholder who asks the question: a CEO, Board member, VC, or boss.
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