#157 – Insufficient Estimate

Our initial estimate is never enough to deliver what we thought we’d deliver, and we end up in situations like the Sagrada Família. Especially, if we are still funding our work in the traditional way, the estimate becomes a budget, so we end up not having enough hours/money to finish our work and building-in quality. And it doesn’t exactly help if someone else, like a Chief Architect or a different team, made the original estimate.

Therefore, start educating your organization on the fact that estimates are never going to hold. Instead of spending a lot of energy on getting better at estimating, invest in changing your ways of funding. In that way, you’ll decouple estimates and funding, so you can use estimates for something more effective, such as forecasting how much work can potentially be delivered, and talks about prioritization of value-add.