What is the best way for project managers to budget and allocate the time that team members have to spend on a project? Depending on how the project will be managed, using traditional practices or agile management techniques, for example, determine whether capacity should be considered in terms of hours (time) or estimated difficulty (effort).
In traditional project management, managers estimate a team member’s work capacity based on task level planning. That is, they estimate how long they expect certain tasks to take to complete and then assign tasks based on a team member’s total available time using traditional tools like Gantt charts. The problem with this approach is that it can lend itself to management at the team member level, not at the project level. In other words, the project manager may end up focusing too much on keeping people busy and micromanaging individual workloads, rather than the overall success of the project being developed and the value it creates for the customer. In developing complex new projects, such as software teams, estimating effort using story points may be a better answer than managing tasks.
Scrum, a popular project management framework developed by agile gurus Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, takes a drastically different perspective in determining how to track and report on project status. Rather than trying to keep team members busy, he focuses on increasing the number of products that can be shipped at each sprint or cadence of work. (That is, ultimately, you focus on the customer, preferring to know that the customer is getting what they asked for, rather than keeping team members busy.) Teams can measure their overall progress against this product increase using a focus on history. estimate points.
How does this estimation process work? In a meeting during which the project manager / manager is absent, teams estimate in abstract figures to quantify the relative effort associated with a particular story (a story is often made up of multiple tasks). Some teams use numerical sizes (that is, a scale of 1 to 10) to estimate the “size” of a story, while others use t-shirt sizes (XS, S, M, L, XL, XXL, XXXL). Some use the Fibonacci sequence (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, etc.) to capture how the difficulty tends to increase exponentially. Other teams have used dog breeds for estimation purposes, in which, for example, a teacup poodle or chihuahua would represent the smallest stories and a Great Dane or bull mastiff would represent the largest. What is important for estimating effort is that the team shares an understanding of the scale they are using so that everyone is comfortable with the scale values.
While the project manager (or Product Owner, in Scrum) needs these estimates to effectively prioritize the backlog elements and consequently forecast the delivery of the product to be developed based on speed, only the team can do these. estimates and the presence of the project. The product owner / manager could pressure (intentionally or otherwise) a team to minimize their effort estimates. Even when team members estimate each other, it is recommended that everyone disclose their estimate at the same time to avoid influencing each other. This process resembles a game of poker in which individuals “show their hands” – or reveal their estimates – simultaneously.
Traditional project managers may be uncomfortable with a management approach that does not address the accuracy of budget hours for tasks. But agile project management methods like Scrum really help managers focus on what really matters in development: successful project completion and a customer who loves the product their team developed.