Item — HN Reader

by shagie·8y ago·view on hn ↗

I'm going from some old bits I wrote nearly 20 years ago about software estimation here... but some of it may be applicable to other projects.

A bit more recent on it can be read at http://www.qsm.com/blog/2016/impossible-region-revisited

Given the estimate of how long something takes, and dividing it up amongst the people who can do it, and then say... we're going to deliver it in 75% of the optimal time (based on the size of the project - increasing the speed of getting it done by adding people and having a more aggressive schedule)...

Well, for the data set of 20,000 projects there were 750 that were trying to deliver in less than 75% of the optimal time. Of those 750, none were able to be completed in that time.

Granted, that was for software projects. But I suspect that beurocratic projects have similar problems. Need it done faster? Add more people. Have more people? Need more meetings. Have more tasks going on at once? More likely that someone is going to be waiting on another task getting complete because of a bad (overly optimistic) estimate / deadline. Have more people doing nothing at any given time? Spend money faster... and run out of budget all that much faster.

I don't disagree but I was hoping for something more compelling than "bad project management".

I'm sure there are other complexities added in when there are pieces of iron rather than silicon involved... and safety regulations start chewing up time and reworks.

But overall, the "if it is possible to do, but someone put too low of a cost in the budget or tried to get it done faster than the engineers said it was doable"... well, isn't that bad project management that promised too much and underdelivered... and then got a canceled project? Is there something else it could be?