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Playing Poker
Posted by Cathryn in : Planning, Project Management , trackbackFor some time now, I’ve done estimating with developers using a technique called Wideband Delphi. It’s fairly simple and is an excellent way of making sure that a good range of developers are involved in the estimates.
The designer, lead developer or, as a last resort, project manager, breaks the work up into smallish units of some sort - modules, screens, reports, whatever seems to be appropriate. A group of developers meet with the project manager to discuss the list, making sure its complete and that everyone understands what’s involved.
They then each go away and separately make the estimates.
In a followup meeting, they come back with their estimates and, facilitated by the project manager, review them and come to a consensus. I then feed this into the project plan and, with contingency based on my own judgement and perhaps in consultation with senior team members, that becomes the plan.
Scrum suggests a variant on this which I tried yesterday with a team which is not fully working under the Scrum method. Instead of going away to make their estimates, we did it together, using playing cards. I gave each team member a suit including Ace, 2, 4, 8, Jack (for 2 days) and King (for far too big - lets think about this some more). We worked through our list of tasks, the team discussing it amongst themselves and, when they were ready, I asked them to select a card to show how long they thought the task would take. When they had done that, I asked them to put the card down.
We then discussed the results, talking about why one person thought something would take a lot longer than someone else did, and came to an agreement on the time we’d assign for each task. Their project manager will now use these estimates for his planning.
And I’m happy to say, it worked a treat. The team appreciated the chance to work through it together. The newest member, who is still coming up to speed, learned a lot. Their project manager got a chance to see how they all thought through the problems, which was revealing in itself. Both he and I now have a much better understanding of what is being done. The most senior team member, who is about to leave the project was able to pass on more of her knowledge to everyone.
We’ll see in a few weeks how good these estimates were, but certainly in the past I’ve found Wideband Delphi (without the Poker variation) leads to better estimates, and a more thorough understanding of the work.
So now, a pack of cards is part of my project management toolkit.
Comments»
The playing cards are an interesting idea…
If the Jack is two days, do the low value cards represent hours?
Sorry, that wasn’t clear.
Yes - Ace, 2, 4, 8 are hours (ie. 8 hours = 1 day).
Jack is 2 days
If its any much bigger than that, its probably better to break it down. So use the King for those.