It’s Sunday, and I’m coming out of a (in-law) family meal. So I need to release some inner pressure. Thank you for assisting me in this task. I hear too often that estimates are tied to complexity. That’s too limiting.

In our moving world, we must act as precisely as possible. Especially in our companies where a constant relationship between effort and value is required (and if we can judge this value as quickly as possible, we’ll be able to measure our effort better).

And so it’s indeed the effort that we estimate. If we continue to estimate, if it’s even necessary: if we’ve broken things down into small pieces that make sense, and we prioritize by value, why estimate? We might as well execute and learn (and wipe the slate clean of estimates).

So it’s indeed the effort that we estimate.

And yes, effort is divided into a) complexity, that is to say brain juice, you need to cogitate before extracting that substantific marrow. For example, finding the right calculation algorithm.

Into b) toil: here no brain juice, but elbow grease. It’s labor, probably repetitive, perhaps vast. For example: painting all the shutters of the Grand Hotel Budapest, changing the class names throughout your entire code.

Into c) what we often wish to avoid: obscurity,

uncertainty, opacity. We advance through the fog. For example

finding a restaurant in an unknown city without an internet connection, map, or plan, or plugging into a third-party system without enough information about it.

The more complexity, the more toil, the more obscurity and the more you raise the effort estimate. But don’t forget if you break down your activity into small pieces that make sense (which is already a form of estimation, by the way) and whose value can thus be measured, and you know how to prioritize, and it will need to be done, no need to estimate, might as well start. This happens more often than we think.

Damn.

I feel better. And I’m pleasing some close ones who ask me for short articles.

Also as a complement, an old article on the curse of the man-day.