Disclaimer
I feel aware that this is a potentially contentious topic. As such, please read the below as something that is subject to change rather than fixed views. I felt like it was important to put some initial thoughts into words, but will more than likely revisit this post and make adjustments over time. If you have views on this topic I would love to hear them.
My Thoughts
A recurring challenge in my career has been working in an Agile way, whilst providing enough information in advance of starting a project to allow long-term business strategic planning and goal setting.
Often we are faced with questions like ‘how long is it going to take’ or ‘when will it be finished’ in advance of taking on new projects. As we know, providing meaningful estimates is difficult or impossible when we accept that requirements will change and we don’t know everything about the work up front. This is exacerbated when making use of new technologies or working on business systems which we have not been exposed to before.
Having said this, I appreciate that time is a useful factor when determining an order and priority of work. Businesses have goals which they want to achieve by a certain time, and features which they want to deliver by certain dates and this sort of planning is difficult without knowing how long projects are likely to take to complete.
We run projects using Agile because we know that requirements change, we find out about things as we go along and we don’t always need to deliver everything to achieve the business needs.
It’s hard to say even broadly how long a project is going to take unless the work is very small, or we’ve done something similar before, or we want to map out and commit to all the requirements up front – which is starting to sound like waterfall.
With Agile the philosophy is ‘deliver value until something else is more of a priority’ and we commit to delivering small incremental improvements – we don’t know what the ‘whole’ of the work is up front.
The question, therefore, is often not ‘how long will it take?’ but ‘how long do we have to spend?’. What we deliver will flex according to the time available.
MrStevenHill 