95% of the time the reason teams "need" that is bullshit internal politics and everyone is better off if you can structure the organisation to not do that.
When I worked for a larger company with a pretty mature product, this was true - deadlines were internal and arbitrary. It also helped that the product was more of a “nice to have” for our customers than “absolutely crucial” - they didn’t truly NEED anything it did (it was software to make social media marketing more efficient).
But I’m now at a smaller Enterprise SaaS startup, where the product is absolutely crucial to the customer’s work (core operational software for public transportation agencies). The reality is that the product isn’t yet mature enough to close big sales without making sales commits. I dislike sales commits, but we’d legitimately lose every big RFP unless we commit to adding the ~2-5 features they really, truly need that we don’t yet have. And sales commits come with real, external due dates, that you need to be able to meet if you don’t want to piss off your customers. You need to be able to say “yeah, we can build X by date Y”, and then actually deliver on that.
This is one of the reasons I’ve stayed where I am for so long. I get paid a nice six figure income to work on a training platform that is useful, but not critical. It is a low stress job with little to no critical dates.
> The reality is that the product isn’t yet mature enough to close big sales without making sales commits. I dislike sales commits, but we’d legitimately lose every big RFP unless we commit to adding the ~2-5 features they really, truly need that we don’t yet have. And sales commits come with real, external due dates, that you need to be able to meet if you don’t want to piss off your customers.
That's just pushing the issue one level higher. Most likely both the customer and you would be happier if you were able to iterate with them rather than building the thing they thought they would want however many months back. (And while it may be harder to set up that kind of contract, it's absolutely possible)
> Most likely both the customer and you would be happier if you were able to iterate with them rather than building the thing they thought they would want however many months back. (And while it may be harder to set up that kind of contract, it's absolutely possible)
Possible? Sure. Just like it's possible that I could win the national lottery.
In practice, multiple companies bid for contracts, and all of the bids have to be of the form "Deliver $X in $Y months for $Z dollars".
No company is going to accept "Choose us, and we'll work until you're happy with the product or you run out of money, whichever comes first".
Agile doesn't work where there's competition for the project. It can't, because the buyer of that project cannot evaluate "we'll work until your money runs out" against the other bids that state "$X in $Y months for $Z dollars".
Agile works well for internal teams that are sheltered from having to provide competitive bids.
The problem is winning the RFPs. There are some core features and integrations that they really, really want. If we don’t have them, and won’t give a firm commitment to building them, we lose the RFP.
“We’ll work collaboratively and evolve the product over time in yet-to-be-determined ways” can work when you have an established relationship and 2-way trust, but there’s not much of that during an RFP. If a competitor commits to their biggest asks, and we don’t, we lose the RFP.
Its an example of bad leadership. You see it often. Higher management thinks product x can be ready in a y period. Reality is much different. One of the key reasons why companies and products fail.
This is not true for most. Imagine going to a contractor to get a house built and they tell you that they can’t tell you what it will cost or when it will be done.
You have obviously never built a house in the U.S., otherwise you would never make such a statement.
As almost everyone knows, construction delays and cost overruns are the norm, not the outlyer. Construction projects here very often suffer dearly from the "2 more weeks and/or a couple more thousand dollars" overrun issues.
In fact, I'm sure at least several people who have been trapped in a home renovation nightmare LOLed deeply after reading your post.
I’ve worked on the building of major resorts that many people in this thread have probably been to. I’ve seen this done well before, and I’m happy to compare credentials if that’s the route you want to go. Then we can see who LOLs.
A major resort is a project that has very large contractors involved and where a part of the upside for the contractor is how well they can manage the buffer they built into the quote for the project. The smaller that buffer the bigger the chance they will win the bid but also the bigger the chance that they will end up losing money on the deal.
Houses (not housing tracts) tend to be built by much smaller contractors who are in absolutely no position to absorb any setback without going bankrupt, you can't apply the rules for 'big business' to small time operators and expect the exact same outcome.
Constructing resorts also has all kinds of economies of scale that building individual houses does not.
That’s fair, I may have picked a poor example, but I maintain a business needs to be able to have a reasonable estimate of the cost of doing something, and often needs the ability to hit a target date.
This is very doable in software, and I’ve seen it done for decades from all levels of the org chart.
I don't know about the US but in Germany this is already the case. You get a rough estimate but nothing is set in stone.
Overshooting deadlines and increasing costs due to materials not being available or them suddenly costing twice as much is normal.
Also coordination between all the various contractors is always getting messed up because the person putting up the scaffolding didn't show up, so the plumber cannot work and cannot come back for 3 weeks, which messes up the plan for the drywall, which gets pushed back, and so on.
But they give you an estimate for cost and time, and are reasonably close to it. I.e. it doesn’t cost 3x the estimate!
They could probably do it more accurately but it would lose them bids, so they knowingly low-ball it. You shouldn’t have that problem inside a company doing software.
Of course you have that problem inside s company building software.
Engineers low ball partly because they don’t know what’s involved in a new piece of work. Like walking between two points on a map; they don’t know what they’ll run into on the ground.
Managers and stake holders then bully the engineers into lowering the estimates because even that’s not quick enough. Worse, they scale the team without discussion without realising that will make the project harder to deliver.
That's pretty much every contractor that I've ever worked with. It's all based on estimates with set minimums, buffers in time and money to deal with the weather and other outside influences and even provisions to deal with the changes in price for raw materials.
The only way you are going to get a hard quote is if you buy a prefab or a house that the contractor has already put up multiple times (and even then there will be some room for adjustment). Oh, and foundations are a completely different story.
Yes, I think we are saying the same thing. You use buffers and other means of flexibility to hit a target launch, and it works most of the time but not all the time.
Makes sense only if you assume building software is like building a house. Imagine getting an author to tell you when the novel they are writing will be finished?
Or this: imagine seeking an estimate on when a house will be built, trimmed, painted, furnished, decorated, and filled with every item needed practically and for comfort by the homeowner.
It’s a living process that requires continuous reassessment of priorities and scope, and in fact never finishes when you consider the life of the home.
So you think it’s reasonable to have no idea what it will cost, or when it will be done, when building software? You think it’s possible to run a successful business that way?
> So you think it’s reasonable to have no idea what it will cost, or when it will be done, when building software? You think it’s possible to run a successful business that way?
It absolutely is; look at some of the biggest and most successful software companies in the world. No-one has any idea what facebook will cost or when it will be done (Zuckerberg has said that he was off by at least 5 orders of magnitude IIRC). No-one has any idea what google will cost or when it will be done. No-one has any idea what amazon will cost or when it will be done. No-one has any idea what netflix will cost or when it will be done.
Google and Facebook are companies. They aren’t features. I know a lot of people at both companies, and they absolutely gave dates and estimation for many things.
I make a point of stopping project managers when they use the analogy of building a house to push back on estimates. What was the contractor doing before the current job? Building a house. What will they do after this job? Build a house.
By contrast, software development is doing stuff that hasn't been done before. You may be lucky, and have done something similar. If it's really been done before, you would ideally be using something off the shelf.
For me, a project manager who uses this analogy has no place running a software project.
Construction companies can do all sorts of projects, and still usually have to meet a deadline. Do you think every bridge or skyscraper is the same, just because they are all bridges and skyscrapers? And do you think mechanical engineers are also not estimating delivery dates just because they usually create new stuff? Because that's not the case.
Also, tons of software dev isn't actually about pushing boundaries or doing something that hasn't been done before. In fact, I'd say most development is about implementing known solutions but in a customized way. Just like every other engineering field.
The analogy was house building. Generally a house builder will not be building skyscrapers next month.
And the project managers who use the analogy don’t make the comparison with significant and novel civil engineering projects. They make the comparison with having their kitchen extended.
A few months ago i worked at a company which estimated 2 months, after 1 year and a half it’s still not done, i quit a couple of weeks ago
But the client, a really bigcopany, it’s angry but stillwaiting, lying to tjeir upper managent to get a few bonuses
Imagine wanting a two floor house with a closed kitchen and once all the wall built you request your contractor to have a single floor one with the garage underground now and an open kitchen with island.
With a loose enough contract that they can ask whatever for free.
My current team only estimates projects not tickets and does not do scrum, and I don’t notice a difference in performance from scrum teams I’ve been on.
Furthermore, I worked on a 18 month project that was estimated by someone who was not on the team that implemented it and it was implemented on time without overtime, and without any special process. Maybe that was unicorn, but it happens.
I think just having a manager/tech lead that cares and maintains priorities is all it takes to stay on track.
Processes are great tools in the hands of good managers / leaders. Good processes in the hands of bad ones, or bad company culture, does not make them good managers.
Outside of software, you see the same thing over and over again with Lean Management and TPS.
> but it misses the thing many teams need and that is a process to reliably hit dates they commit to
40 years of IT experience lead me to believe that this is only possible for the most trivial of projects with nailed down specifications and where the party building it has relevant domain knowledge. In practice such projects don't really exist. Trivial IT projects are rare, specs change, scope creep is a thing and domain knowledge is built up slowly over time.
What is necessary is that the work does not occupy more time and effort than it strictly requires. That is still a hard problem, but much less hard than to find a way to hit dates that you commit to, unless you give yourself ample room to deal with the realities of complex IT development work.
I think we’re on the same page, you have to give yourself room to deal with the complexities. It’s not perfect, but it’s a far cry from those saying there shouldn’t be any estimates or date targets with predictable delivery.