Estimates Versus Commitments

The key to this type of estimating is to ask for a commitment rather than just a top-down estimate. Asking for a commitment brings the business dimension into clearer focus for the team member by emphasizing the impact of not meeting your commitment. It also forces people to think through their approach more carefully, perhaps breaking it down into smaller achievements, which are, in turn, easier to get a handle on. Technical and creative environments are tricky quarters to plan within. The individuals who excel in these areas need room to explore and experiment with various ideas. The very concept of a project plan is at odds with the creative environment. Approaching the planning effort by asking for top-down commitments for reaching the next achievement/milestone creates a win-win situation. You, the project manager, get the information that you need to manage the project, and the technical expert will see a planning process that doesn't restrict his creative side—and may actually help him to add valuable structure to the technical approach. Finally, gaining commitments from individual team members is a great way to pull the whole team together and ensure that they are all rowing in the same direction.

Agile Strategy

Combine your request to individuals for a top-down duration estimate on a milestone with a request for a commitment to meet that estimate.

The process of building an achievement-based schedule using committed durations is not necessarily easy, but it will be more effective in an agile environment. Commitments tend to be dependent on each other, so the whole team needs to work together and become engaged for this process to work. Rather than spending energy to estimate resource allocations and durations along a single sequence of activities, as is done in the classic planning method, the team will find itself developing a primary pathway and several alternative pathways. They will be identifying decision points that will drive or eliminate certain pathways. And they will begin strategizing their overall approach to the project. For these reasons, a network diagram is often a better mechanism than the more common Gantt chart for depicting the high-level view of the agile project.

Agile Strategy

Use network diagrams rather than Gantt charts to show the multiple pathways and corresponding decision points in the agile project.