3 Questions to Ask Before Estimating an Agile Program

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.

  Agile   Estimating  

Many organizations want to see an estimate for your program (a collection of projects with one business deliverable) before they fund it. So, the teams might spend significant time estimating everything the product owners and managers hope will be in the product from today’s perspective.

Or, you might try a “sprint zero” to understand the current set of requirements and the architecture. You get partway through the program and either the requirements change, the teams realize the architecture changes or you realize you mis-estimated. Whatever the problem, the estimate no longer works. Yet, your management wants you still to deliver the program “as promised.”

Before you estimate, consider these three questions and what they might buy you:

1. How much would you like to invest in time, money, or learning before we stop?
2. Are you ready to watch the program grow as we build it so you can stop us when you don't want to invest anymore?
3. What is the value of this project or program to you?

How much would you like to invest?
Bruce is a program manager in an organization starting with agile approaches. It has done fairly well with single-team projects. Now, it has an idea for a significant program (15 feature teams and people across sales, marketing and training). It needs an agile program.

Bruce met with the operations committee, …

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