Should We Eliminate Estimates?

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Agile   Estimating  

I recently become more aware of the trend in agile toward the elimination of estimates. It’s got a popular hashtag (#NoEstimates), so that automatically makes it a thing. And it has actually been around for quite a few years; it’s been gaining more exposure recently, increasing the number of people who are aware of it.

There is always a risk in trying to summarize something that is viewed as a movement in just a few sentences, so I encourage you to do your own research if you wish to know more. But essentially, the argument is that estimating is wasteful and should therefore be avoided. Instead, make stories consistently small and count how many there are. Any variance will average out over the length of the initiative, making those variances essentially irrelevant.

Coming from a background originally in traditional project management, I have a lot of sympathy for the argument—even if I would have been personally hesitant to advocate for it. But anyone who has sat down with a plan-driven project team and sought to estimate work packages knows that it is generally an exercise in guesswork. It’s a source of significant frustration for the team, and frequently results in numbers that are wildly inaccurate with no basis in reality.

Agile may take a different approach, often focusing on story points. But while this is a more simplistic method, it&…

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