MBA1333 Guest Teacher: Laura B. Janusek- How to Estimate How Long a Group Project Will Take

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Hey oh. Welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA show, the business podcast that delivers daily business nuggets to help you and your business every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online and today's episode is a Guest teacher episode. Today's guest teacher is Laura B. Genesek and she'll be teaching you how to estimate how long a group project will take. I absolutely love this lesson topic because it's so underserved. When we're working on a project with our team, we often set these arbitrary deadlines without really finding out how long it really should take. We're often worried that our team is going to take longer than they should have if we don't set a deadline. In today's lesson, you'll learn how to estimate. At least have an estimate of how long a project will take and then you can move forward from there. It's not a deadline, but at least it gives you a gauge of how much time you should dedicate towards a project. Laura does a fantastic job delivering today's lesson. She gives you a great strategy that gets your team involved and gets them buy in gets them really feeling they're part of the process. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Today's guest teacher, Laura B. Genesack is one of the founding members at Modern Teacher. She's also the Chief Product Officer there. She's spoken at numerous tech conferences on how to project manage your team. Let me tell you firsthand, running a software business for five years over at Webinar Ninja, project management is not easy. Getting your team involved, to understand what's involved in accomplishing a project, in accomplishing a feature release and accomplishing something that's going to take some time to produce. You don't want to have no estimates and you don't want to have arbitrary strict deadlines. So Laura's going to give you a formula today that's going to teach you how to estimate group projects, whether you're in the software industry or otherwise. So you know how long it should take or I should say how long it will take. I'll be back to wrap up today's lesson, but for now I'm going to pass it on to Laura. So to teach you today's guest teacher lesson. Take it away, Laura.

Hey everybody, I'm Laura Janicek. Thank you for joining me today. And today I'll be teaching you how to estimate how long a group project will take. So let's get down to business. First off, let's talk about estimating in general. Now I'm coming from the software industry, working with developers and creating web based platforms. And in the software space, estimating is actually a little controversial. There's a whole movement that believes developers and their teams shouldn't be asked to estimate how long software builds will take because there are a lot of unknowns and estimates can be misused to create rigid schedules that don't allow for those unknowns. The debate around these ideas is actually pretty heated on social media. You can dig into it by searching noestimates and you'll find a lot of opinions. But I'm in the camp that thinks estimates can be incredibly valuable when they're done right. So that's what we're going to talk about today. And it's not just software. Good estimating techniques can apply across industries. Now there are a lot of different types of estimates, so if you're really interested in estimating, just know there's a lot out there and it's more than we'll be able to cover today. Today we're going to zero in on just one estimating technique that's particularly good to use on projects that will require group collabor. And that's the poker method, also known as scrum poker or planning poker or estimations poker. And here's how it works. First you need to take your project and break it down into little pieces to be estimated individually. This is a common problem with estimates. Someone will ask you how long will this take? And it's too broad a question to really answer, so you have to break it down. For instance, if you're event planning, instead of trying to answer how long will it take to plan this event? You'll want to think about the individual pieces. How long will it take to search for venues, then contact them for pricing, then pick one and work out booking it? How long will it take to order the food? How long to produce custom event swag? How long to find and set up a system to handle registrations and payments? Another example would be a content creation project. Maybe you're working on a marketing campaign or a blog. You'd want to break it down into time spent researching, drafting, editing, creating graphics, etc. So step one is to break it down into little pieces. And an example I'm going to return to is estimating how long you'd need to go on a cross country road trip from Chicago to la. Again, if someone asked you to estimate that all up front, your estimate probably wouldn't be that accurate. I mean, you'd probably just use Google Maps as a starting point. But assuming that didn't exist, you your initial guess likely wouldn't be a timeline you'd want to commit to. So you'd have to break it down thinking about the steps you'd want to take along the way. First, estimate how long it would take just to get from Chicago to St. Louis, then maybe from St. Louis to Kansas City, then Kansas City to Denver, and on and on until you reach la and there's no one right route to get there. You design your road trip just like you design any project you're working on. The way you get it done will be unique to you and your team. Next, you'll want to decide what unit you're estimating in. Are you estimating in weeks for a really huge project that's honestly probably too big to be very accurate, but you could try it. Or are you estimating in days or hours? Or another unit? For instance, in the software world, it's common to estimate in points. It doesn't really matter what metric you're using as long as your team is all using the same one consistently. For the sake of our road Trip example, let's assume you're estimating in hours. Okay? Now, once you have your project broken down into pieces and you've decided what unit you're estimating in, here's how you actually play planning poker. Imagine you and your team. So anyone working on the project, you're all in a room around a table, and each of you has a hand of cards. Ace, 1, 2, 3, all the way up to king. Each card corresponds to an estimate. Ace is 1 hour, 2 is 2 hours, 3 is 3, etc. And if your estimate gets higher than a king, which would be 13 hours, like you're estimating right off the bat how long it would take to drive from Chicago to Denver, you probably need to break that piece down into smaller pieces. So you've got the pieces of your project and everyone's got their cards. What you do is focus on just the first piece. So in our case, just driving From Chicago to St. Louis, one person leading the estimates explains that first piece. Then everyone picks the card in their hand that represents their estimate, and everyone puts their card down on the table in front of them, face down. So if I think that drive would take five hours, I would pick my five card and put that down on the table in front of me. The face down part is important. So everyone is estimating independently. Then once everyone has laid down a card, the facilitator has everyone flip their card over at the same time and you compare the estimates. If everyone is estimating around the same number, then you can make a note of that number. Say, okay, everyone's estimating around a five or a six. Let's go with that, call it a six and move on to the next piece of the project. And if you can't be physically together with your team, or if you just don't have cards, there are a lot of online tools to do this virtually. So just search for Planning Poker Online or Estimations Poker Online, and you'll find plenty of options. Now, if everyone was always on the same page with how long each piece would take, this would be a pretty easy process. But what makes this technique really valuable is when you flip the cards and you see there's a wide range in the estimates. So maybe you're still seeing lots of fives and sixes, but one person is estimating a nine and one is at a three. What you do in this case is have those two people talk through their estimates. It's possible that one or both of them just didn't really understand what was being estimated. So this is A good chance to clarify it for everyone. But it's also possible that the person estimating a 9 has better insight into some of the complexity that other people are overlooking. In our road trip example, maybe this person knows that there's major construction and you're going to have to take a detour. Or maybe the person estimating a 3 knows of a shortcut that the rest of the team hasn't heard of. So it's important to give them a chance to talk it out, let the rest of the team listen, and then everyone revotes. Not just the high and low estimators, but the whole team can use the insights from their conversation to come to a better estimate. So everyone picks up their original cards and then puts down a card for their revised estimate. And you repeat that process until everyone gets on the same page and is estimating at least close to the same number, and you can average the final votes and move on. Once you've gone through the process for each part of your project and you've estimated each piece of your journey, you can add up the average team estimates for each piece and you'll get a rough total. There you go. Now, there are a lot of benefits to estimating this way. First of all, it gets everyone involved, so there's not just one person dictating how long things should take. This can be good for team buy in because people have a chance to let their voices be heard and come to a consensus as a group. It also promotes accuracy because it helps the team avoid a cognitive bias called anchoring, which happens when the first person to throw out an estimate anchors the rest of the team around that number and effectively influences their estimates moving forward. If it's not up to the fastest or loudest team member to throw out the estimate, then everyone has a chance to think it through independently without a potentially inaccurate number factoring in. Also, the whole process keeps things organized and really clarifies the project as a whole for people, giving everyone a chance to talk through each piece and make sure they're on the same page with what the team is trying to accomplish and how. And there are a range of other benefits, but one I really like is that it allows you to figure out multiple timelines for the project based on cuts. This won't always work out, but say there's a piece that's estimated pretty high and it's really just a nice to have. It's not necessary to get the project done. If it means getting things done that much faster, you might decide to just cut that part of the project, or come back to it later, or schedule it to be done at the end so that if you run out of time, at least you're not missing something critical. This can be particularly helpful when you're working on a software release and you're wanting to get something valuable out to your users as soon as possible. You're going for the minimum viable product, the MVP that will deliver value to your users. If one little feature is going to mean you can't release for an extra two weeks, maybe you release without that feature and you add it in as an enhancement after the fact. And without doing estimates, you might not have realized that that was a viable option that would get value to your users faster. Now, before we wrap up, I just want to end on a note that raw estimates are not deadlines and they shouldn't be treated that way even when they're coming from group consensus. There are a number of things that need to be factored into the estimates before they can be used to create a real timeline or schedule for the work. And this is another reason why some people don't like estimates, because this step is often done wrong. We don't have time to dig into it here, but I wanted to just be sure to touch on the idea in the software space. In particular, you'll want to track and factor in your team's velocity to help determine a real timeline, as well as time for quality assurance, unforeseen issues, maintenance, et cetera. And these principles apply to working out timelines in other industries as well. So it's important to remember that estimates are a helpful starting point, but they are still estimates. So you need to factor in time for additional work, track team progress as you go, and adjust accordingly. All right, so we've come to the end of our time. We've talked through how to plan projects by breaking them into pieces, playing a little team poker, and the benefits of this technique. Again, this is Lara Janicek, and this topic is something I really enjoy and I've spoken about it at a number of tech conferences.

So.

So I can definitely go deeper into it. If you're interested in discussing it further, or product management, or education technology, or building software in general, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter bjanisek or on LinkedIn. Thanks again for joining me. And now back to Omar.

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Absolutely love today's lesson. By Laura B. Genesack I loved that poker estimation method. It allows everybody to get involved on the team and give an unbiased estimation not influenced by anybody else on the team. It gives everybody a voice, even those introverts on your squad. I can tell you firsthand with all the projects, so many projects over the last five years running our software company, Webinar Ninja, there's so many unknowns. There's so many things that sort of creep up while you're working, while you're in development, that you don't see at the start when you're making an estimate. So when you have a hard deadline, you're making the deadline more important than the product, than the result, than the project itself. But what this does, it at least gives you a framework. It gives you an estimate, gives you, the CEO, an understanding of when possibly you can release this project, when you can give it to your users. So the point here is, is not to hold it over the heads of your team, but to have some consensus about guys. Generally, this is how long this should take. Whether it's three weeks or three months. If it goes over a few days, totally fine. Because we want to make sure we deliver a great product, a great solution to our users, to our customers. But if it's taking double the time, we have an issue here either with our estimation or with our implementation. I kind of learned this the hard way. Total transparency. I used to have hard deadlines. I used to drive the team towards those deadlines. And what happens is that they realize, okay, deadline is key. We got to make sure we don't to our deadlines and the quality of the product suffers. It may not be a glaring issue to users, but it can creep up later on and you'll have to fix it afterwards and it actually causes more work and pain in the long run. At the end of the day, your goal is to serve your customers with the best product possible. If that's the focus and your team understands that, then they're going to think quality over speed, quality over delivery time, which is really what you want to do here. Whatever the project. Thank you so much for listening to the Hundred Dollars NBA Show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe right now on whatever you like to use to listen to podcasts. Whether it's Spotify, whether it's Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Radio, Overcast, any app you use, hit subscribe so you get our latest episode automatically. Want to thank all our longtime listeners. Recently Apple Podcasts updated itunes and the podcast app and has listed the Hundred Dollar NBA show as an all time bestseller podcast in our category Careers. So proud of that. We can't do it without your support as listeners. So hit subscribe, tell your friends, and keep it going. All right, before I go, I want to leave you with this Getting buy in from your team, getting them involved in the decision of the estimate is so important. You want people to have ownership over what they're doing. No one wants to be told what to do. You were told what to do when you were a child. You're trying to run away from that as an adult. People want to make decisions on their own. They want to make it based on discussion and facts and experience. And by getting buy in from your team on these estimates, they internally know they don't have an excuse not to deliver in around that estimate. You know it's not a deadline. But at the same time, they understand that, hey, we agreed to this. This is kind of what we came up with at the end as a team. I was involved. Let's go ahead and do this. It's more motivating to do that rather than just follow an arbitrary deadline that's been dictated from above. Speaking from experience here, guys. Okay, I'll check you guys in the next episode tomorrow. I'll see you then. Take.

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