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Estimating With Inch-Pebbles
Johanna Rothman, known as the "Pragmatic Manager," offers frank advice for your challenging problems. She consults with leaders and teams to help them learn about practical and possible options. They can then decide how to adapt their product development. Her most recent book is "Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility." See www.jrothman.com for all her books.
Every project can use inch-pebbles at some point to estimate tasks and monitor progress.
This is the third installment in a series of adapted excerpts from the author’s new book, Manage It! Your Guide to Modern Pragmatic Project Management, published by Pragmatic Bookshelf.
Inch-pebbles are the breakdown of each project task into very small pieces, no more than two days in duration, generally only one day long. If you're familiar with Extreme Programming (XP), inch-pebbles are user stories. Inch-pebbles are either done or not done; they are not some percentage complete. Collections of inch-pebbles are the multiple-day or multiple-week tasks that teams normally create when they define tasks in a schedule. In reality, inch-pebbles are a way to define tasks that fit into small timeboxes — one or two days in duration.
Every project can use inch-pebbles at some point to estimate tasks and monitor progress. Inch-pebbles are especially useful if you have project team members who forget tasks when they estimate. Creating inch-pebbles pushes team members to remember all the steps they need to take. Some of the most common forgotten tasks are managing the software configuration management system and rework.
Especially in a serial life cycle, it's easy to underestimate the amount of rework required. Or a developer might forget about developer testing …
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