No News is Bad News - Feedback Must Create Steering Signal from Plan

Project Manager: How's the project progressing to plan??

Developers: We're spending money, consuming resources, and producing outputs the customer likes.?

Project Manager: I was more interested in our performance against our planned spending, resource consumption, and customer-valued outputs.?

Developers:?What do you mean, we didn't estimate any of that, we're managing this project with #NoEstimates. You know that new alternative to estimates for making decisions in software development. That is a way to make decisions with "No Estimates." of the impacts on the future of those estimates or our work on the future cost, schedule, or technical performance. You know where we can use Decision-making frameworks for projects that do not require estimates, apply Investment models for software projects that do not require estimates, and have our project management methods for risk management, scope management, and progress reporting do not require any of those annoying estimates. Because we suck at them anyway, we just decided that instead of learning how to estimate, we'll not estimate and get back to coding.

Project Manager:?Oh, you mean that approach of managing other people's money that violates the principles of software microeconomics with Open Loop Control - where our organization can make business decisions on allocating our limited resources without examining how those decisions affect the supply and demand of our resources. Would you happen to know about those resources? Like money, people, and time?

Developers: Yeah, we don't need any of that mumbo-jumbo microeconomics that we all learned in school since we didn't pay attention in that boring statistics and probability class that tried to teach us that all variables on a project are random variables. We should know something about their behavior in the future if we're going to have any hope in hell of ever managing this project in the presence of uncertainty about those values.

Project Manager: What's that smell??Let's start rearranging the deck chairs on our ship here soon because I smell an Iceberg getting closer.

A project can only be managed to successful closure with steering targets defined at periodic intervals for the expenditure of cost, schedule, and technical performance. Knowing what those steering targets should be requires estimating their values and then measuring the actual values to develop the needed steering signal—the variance between the plan and the actual.

The only way out of the need to estimate those intermediate steering targets is to?straight line the budget, schedule, and needed technical performance - from start to end, and then measure the actual performance.?

Like the intended route of the Titanic, our project does not proceed in a straight line, so that idea is a non-starter. And like the Titanic, our project must distinguish the intended speed from the actual speed, just like we can't confuse the budget - the total planned crossing time - with the actual cost - the total crossing time.

Without those pesky intermediate targets to steer toward—those targets created by estimating the?needed cost, needed scheduled arrival date, and needed capabilities on the needed date?for the needed cost—we're managing the project Open Loop, driving in a straight line, never knowing what will pop up in front of our path.?

Say goodbye to Kate Leonardo; you're gonna get wet.