Estimates are not in our nature, for a couple of reasons.
Humans aren’t that good at estimating
Your friends aren’t late for the night out because they’re inconsiderate.
That one project didn’t miss the deadline because people were slacking off.
It’s because humans can’t accurately estimate tasks. Especially the bigger they get. It’s a frustrating experience for both sides.
Web design and development are even worse. One is a creative task. The other has a ton of uncertainties. If you can imagine an “estimation hell”, this is it.
We’re an agile agency
In an ideal world, agile kind of discourages estimates. We’re not in an ideal world, and by now we’ve figured out how to deal with that.
But back then, we only estimated development behind the scenes – and even that wasn’t as much about the actual estimate, as it was about the crucial conversations before putting a number on it.
But people need estimates
With one of our existing clients, the idea of “no estimates” was a deal-breaker.
It makes sense – we already said that people need estimates. We’re collaborating as a team, so when there are dependencies, missing a deadline can ruin everyone’s day.
So we gave truly agile estimates.
We are used to moving fast, both for internal and external tasks. Our estimates reflected that. If we expected to get something done same-day (with some padding), that was the estimate.
And this worked great 7 out of 10 times. Then, 2 out of 10 it wouldn’t be a big deal that we had a little delay. Sometimes it was on us, sometimes it was an unexpected dependency, and sometimes it was just an unknown thing that popped up.
But then there was that 1 out of 10 situation where the client had a meeting with the C-suite all scheduled, and they had to cancel it a day or two before because of a delay.
How the client helped us figure out estimates
Eventually, it was too much. The client’s team asked for an extra retrospective to find a better way forward.
Getting the estimates right was as simple as having an honest conversation. We’ve learned that we can be a bit more pessimistic about estimates.
It helped us understand their specific need for estimates. It wasn’t for them to be spot on, and not even about setting expectations on the retainer usage.
It was all about consistency for them. If we do 9 out of 10 tasks extremely fast and “on time”, but one of them is delayed by just a day or two – that was a bad experience for the client’s team.
It was more important to get all 10 done “on time”, even if much slower.
The lesson?
Speed isn’t as important as many people claim.
It’s business. Everything is urgent. And when everything is urgent, nothing is.
The default is always “need it now”, or “needed it yesterday”. But when push comes to shove, there are far, far more important things.
You can uncover them by having an open conversation with everyone involved.