Johanna Rothman in Maintaining Project Agility has a positive take on the skill of estimating:
“In my experience, most engineers with more than five years of experience are actually fairly good estimators, they just can’t estimate the amount of weekly bureaucracy they have to deal with.”
Scott Berkun (author of The Myths of Innovation) writes:
“[...] What people really mean when they say “I don’t have time” is this thing is not important enough to earn my time. It’s a polite way to tell people they’re not worth your time.
This means people who are always busy are time poor. They have a time shortage. They have time debt. They are either trying to do too much, or they aren’t doing what they’re doing very well. They are failing to either a) be effective with their time b) don’t know what they’re trying to effect, so they scramble away at trying to optimize for everything, which leads to optimizing nothing.”
Jeffrey Phillips: Why is fighting fires more valuable than avoiding fires?
“For some reason we believe that sweeping in and fixing a problem has more drama, and gains more attention, than doing the work to predict and avoid problems.”
I think the problem is also a blame game. If we acknowledged that there were ways we could avoid the fire, then we would implicitly own the problem and more so, be responsible for avoiding the next occurrence. But when the next fire comes, implicitly we’ve now failed. The goal was to avoid the fire, not react quickly. This requires strategic thinking.
So if we never acknowledge there is a change that could make things better, then when the fire comes, we just block and tackle — it is happening to us, not caused by us. No one is to blame for the fire, and thus our only measure of success is our reaction speed.
Blocking and tackling is easy. Strategic thinking is hard.
Media multitaskers pay mental price, Stanford study shows:
“You might think a lot gets done when you multitask, but a study conducted by Stanford researchers Eyal Ophir, Clifford Nass and Anthony Wagner says it isn’t so.”
Uncle Bob, in his talk on software craftsmanship, said “If schedule is more important that accuracy, then I can always be on time.”
It doesn’t get more simple than that. If you want to know which one is more important in your own organization, ask this: If a planned release clearly can not be completed on time, do you cut features to make the schedule, or do you push the schedule out? If you cut features, I can promise you, you are also cutting quality and accuracy too.
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