Situations / Estimating time and cost
Estimating time and cost
Predicting how long something will take or what it will cost.
Traps you might be in
Tools to try
- No. 0381 Fermi EstimationThe launch meeting starts in ten minutes, and you still need a defensible guess at how many support agents to book.
- No. 0590 Margin of SafetyYour flight lands at noon; you book the three o’clock train and leave the one o’clock ticket alone.
- No. 0704 Outside View vs. Inside ViewYou budget six weeks for a renovation, then learn that the last five similar jobs on your street took four months.
- No. 0754 Pre-MortemImagine the plan has already failed, then explain why. You’ll find problems you couldn’t see while hoping it would work.
Patterns at play
- No. 0119 Brooks’s LawWith the release already two weeks late, your most experienced engineer spends Monday teaching three new hires the build process.
- No. 0264 Diminishing ReturnsYou hire another pair of hands, but the same cramped kitchen sends out only a few more meals.
- No. 0468 Hofstadter’s LawYou add two extra weeks to a software launch, then spend both fixing a dependency nobody knew was there.
- No. 0722 Parkinson’s LawYou have all afternoon to send a simple email, and by five you’ve rewritten it six times.
- No. 1030 Theory of ConstraintsYour team doubles its assembly speed, but finished orders still pile up beside the same overloaded testing bench.
- No. 1090 Wisdom of CrowdsYour team’s guesses for next month’s sales range widely, but their average lands closer than anyone expected.