#172 – Others’ Estimate

If Management, or even your Product Manager/Owner, asks you to work with someone else’s estimate (and, thus, budget, often), teach them that only the ones who will do the work should estimate the work—and, that you and your team, therefore, will need to re-estimate the work based on your knowledge and experience.

If changing the way work is funded in your organization to something more “agile” (e.g., to funding Value Streams, teams or products based on costs) is not going to happen anytime soon, estimates are going to be the best indicator you have on how much money or time you’ll need in order to deliver value. 

Just remember not to invest too much time in improving your ability to estimate; it’s sub-optimization, and the estimates will never hold no matter hard you try to improve your estimation skills, anyway—so, spend your time and energy on changing your approach to funding, instead.