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Longer Time = Lower Precision - Mike Cohn
How much confidence should leadership have in an agile plan? It depends. Plans vary greatly in their precision depending on the time horizon.
Teams typically create different plans for different time horizons. They might, for example, make a three-month plan, a one-year plan, and a three-year plan. You can depend on those plans, as long as they reflect the appropriate level of precision for the time horizon.
If I'm looking at what I'm going to do three days from now, I can give you a fairly precise rundown of what I will accomplish. I know what I'm going to get done. I will write 1-3 YouTube scripts and approve a small set of website changes. I might also have time to review an AI tool we’re developing.
So for a plan where the deadline is 3 days from now, I can give you a pretty detailed accounting of what I’ll get done. But notice I’ve left the plan just imprecise enough to account for uncertainty. I’ve built in a bit of wiggle room with my range of scripts and language such as “might.”
On the other hand, if you’re asking me for a plan as to what I’ll finish three months from now, I need even more wiggle room. I'm not exactly sure what I'll do. I'll give you guidance on what I'm going to do. I'll give you expectations. And they'll be reasonable, but they’ll include broad-range estimates and broad-stroke descriptions.
If I’m going out three years from now? I can give you some sort of idea of what we might do in three years if I talk about it in really vague terms: We're going to build a new product in 2-3 years.
As the time horizon grows, the precision needs to decrease to account for the increased variability. Or to put it another way, as the time horizon shrinks and more is known about the project, more precision can be added to the plan.
Barry Boehm described this phenomenon in a 1984 paper “Software Engineering Economics.” Later in his book The Software Project Survival Guide, Steve McConnell coined the term cone of uncertainty in referencing Boehm’s work. McConnell explains, “The Cone narrows only as you make decisions that eliminate variability.”
The further away something is, the bigger the estimate range needs to be to account for variability and uncertainty. Today, for something that I haven’t started yet, I might say it's going to take three to six months. Later, I can say we’ll finish in another one or two months. Later still, I can be even more precise: It’ll take one or two more weeks.
Precision improves as we get closer to the deadline.
Understanding the variability in each plan’s precision can help you succeed with agile,
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