Is Your Date Do-Able? Try Rough-Cut Timeboxing: The Work-Back Model
Lonnie Pacelli is an Accenture/Microsoft veteran with four decades of learnings under his belt. He frequently writes and speaks on leadership, project management, work/life balance, and disability inclusion. Reach him at [email protected] and see more at ProjectManagementAdvisor.com.
As project managers, we’ve likely been faced with getting a one-line explanation of what a sponsor needs—along with a deadline. Depending on the organization, there could be a range of responses—from doing a back-of-the-envelope calculation, getting people in a room to estimate the work, or using a comparative initiative to assess feasibility.
Now, I’m not here to criticize your organization’s approach, but I have found that having something that enables the PM to rough-cut an initiative using some standards can be helpful in providing a lens on whether a date is even remotely achievable. This is where the work-back timebox model comes in.
I’m a huge fan of rough-cut timeboxing, where you subdivide the software development lifecycle into discrete chunks of work, rough-cut estimate the discrete chunks, then aggregate up to an overall rough-cut schedule. Doing so helps take some of the guesswork out of a rough-cut schedule and ensure major chunks of work (like UAT, for instance) don’t get forgotten when developing the rough-cut schedule.
Now, I would never say that rough-cut timeboxing is the magic pill that allows you to commit to dates without understanding the detail; you still need to go through the requirements and design process and put together a detailed schedule to execute the work. This just gives you an idea when you …
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"I do not know anyone who has got to the top without hard work. That is the recipe. It will not always get you to the top, but should get you pretty near." - Margaret Thatcher |
