Pivotal Screen

A lot of the stress in teams comes from a single question. This can be presented in many ways like:

• When is it going to be ready?
• When are we going to finish?
• How long does it takes?
• Are we in course for meeting the deadline?

A lot has been written about agile estimation and the waterfall model, but using a single tool to do the estimation for you can alleviate much of the stress while keeping your team in sync. This post is not about a specific tool, but rather any tool that estimates when a task is going to get done.

You eliminate the possibility to blame a person for giving you an inaccurate estimation by using a tool. Moreover, you can play with different scenarios and priorities and adjust accordingly.

Working with real data instead of assumptions is even better. Therefore, A tool that takes into account what you have done in the past to estimate how long in going to take to complete a task in the future is what you are looking for.

Personally I don’t want to meet anything call deadline. This is a word that fires up a red flag in our client relationship system. It means that the client or team is not delivering sufficient value in a period of time; Therefore, it is sound to “kill” the project instead of keep spending without receiving any real value. The solution is quite simple, yet hard to achieve.

Producing value every week is the solution for this. You can say that you have a deadline every week, but it is not really the case since nobody dies if the deadline is not meet - no pun intended. It is just a week of work and it is a much smaller lost than killing an entire project.

People are going to end up doing the estimation, but on a much smaller scale - At the story level instead of the project level.  If we use tools to reduce the friction that hard questions present, we can work much more efficiently. At the end, responsibility lies within the team.