One Last Objection

"Well, Roscoe," I replied, "as usual you have put your finger on something that makes sense. And I am impressed that you are willing to quantify how late you think you are going to be. But there is a flaw in your theory."

Roscoe perked up immediately. He loves a challenge.

"The problem is, how do I know which one of these zones my project manager falls into? If I know he is an ace, then I'm fine. But what if I've never worked with the guy before?"

"Sheesh," replied Roscoe, "that ain't nothin' more than a calibration problem. Here's how I do it.

"First of all, every time I ask someone to do something, I ask for an estimate. And then pay attention nowI write it down."

At this point, I made the mistake of making a wisecrack about his stubby pencil.

"Listen up, Mr. Smarty Pants. The shortest pencil is longer than the longest memory. And don't forget that when Tiger Woods is out there competing for all those millions, he uses that same short pencil to keep his score."

Chastised, I decided to shut my trap and open my ears.

"So then for software I would try to get them to commit on a variety of subprojects and tasks of various durations. As a matter of course, you should get an estimate at the start of every iteration in an iterative development project. And I write down every estimate. And then I check later on how they did.

"What I get is a bunch of points on my graph of predicted versus actual. Some guys are consistently in one zone. Wonderful. They're calibrated.

"Some guys are gonna be all over the map. If I were you, I'd try to sit down with them and understand that. But sooner or later they have to become predictable, or you'll have to move them down the road. And even you know what to do with the guys in the sandbagger and 'more than two square roots late' categories. Just make sure the door doesn't hit them in the behind on the way out!

"The tool is really pretty useful for the guys who fall in the 'Needs Work' zone. We can show them what they need to do to start helping us make money instead of helping us lose it. It gives them a decent target to shoot at. They need to work at being consistently no more than one square root late, regardless of their estimate.

"See, Joe," he sat back and smiled, "I don't much care, so long as it's predictable. I can always live with one square root late if I know that will be the extent of the damage. I can plan around that."

Beat the tar out of anything I'd ever thought of.