| I feel like "Note the Precision" is one that I most see missed. Partially, this is on engineers. They'll say "That'll take 36 days" and not realize that they're implying a higher level of specificity than they intend. Partially, this is on consumers of estimates (managers, etc). They'll hear "It'll be about 36 days, but that's just a super rough estimate, we haven't planned it out yet, it could be way more..." but they stopped listening and wrote down "estimate: 36 days." My current eng team has fixated on two distinct levels of eng estimates. The first is super high level: "minutes to hours", "hours to days," "days to weeks", "weeks to months," or "months to quarters." The second is a number of hours. We give out the high-level estimates freely - they're super helpful for project planning. We give out the second number only when we have a pretty solid plan with estimated tickets. It's worked pretty well because engineers can always be clear on which estimation type is called for. It's also helpful because non-engineers can get used to hearing the high-level estimates pretty quickly and know to treat them as super vague. * We actually deliver all hour estimates as 30/60/90 estimates: "we're 30% sure it'll be done in 36 hours, 60% sure it'll be done in 50 hours, and 90% sure it'll be done in 80 hours". There's still a tendency of people to just use the 60% estimate as "The Estimate," but it's better than nothing. |