Why is “When will you be done?” so hard to answer reliably?
The question “When will you be done with X?” is asked a lot at work. It often creates tension, because it’s hard to give a reliable answer. Why is that, and what can we do about it?
Imagine it’s 10:00 on a weekend morning and you’re full of energy and motivation to clean your kitchen. You look around and decide exactly which parts you’ll clean and to what extent. When will you be done?
It’s probably easy for you to produce an answer. However, what might delay your actual finish time?
Now let’s look at your professional/paid work. It is susceptible to similar challenges: interruptions, scope changes, switching to other important tasks, inefficient sequencing, and missing resources. In addition, some tasks require learning, approvals, and waiting for colleagues to free up. This is what happens when your work exists within a much bigger and more complicated context (and, you’re not a machine).
Say you manage your work using Kanban or Scrum. Did you realize they deal with these matters quite differently? Importantly, they make different assumptions.
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Kanban expects these delays to occur. Therefore, a Kanban system includes mechanisms to minimize their impact, such as limiting work in progress and managing flow. It includes mechanisms for noticing delays easily, such as work visualization and specific metrics. And its primary orientation is to services, not teams.
Scrum aims to eliminate these delays by creating a certain structure:
Establishing a reliable approach to work takes time and effort and, importantly, fulfilling the right conditions of the method you base it on. If a Scrum team, for example, consistently struggles to finish work by sprint end, the likely reason is that one or more of Scrum’s expectations isn’t met properly. Perhaps the team doesn’t have all the skills and knowledge for completing all needed work, or some members are not always available, or interruptions are excessive, or impediments are not removed. (The reasons these occur belong in a separate discussion.)
Whatever approach you use, people will continue asking “When will you be done?” because they want or need to know. So be aware of your approach’s assumptions about managing or preventing delays. And when you answer the question, also articulate the conditions that must be met for your answer to be reliable.
Software engineering, management and technical leadership
2 年"Cleaning the kitchen" analogy is probably more applicable to a very well-defined work scope with very little possible surprises (depends on the kitchen of course ??). I find that in a "green field" new development it is usually much harder to get the accurate date estimates because it's not only about delays but also about "iterating" and "discovering" the actual solution that works. Additionally, the meaning of Done also often tends to get re-adjusted as we get closer to the product we want.