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hibernator149

- Manager: How long would it take to migrate from A to let's say B?

- Me: How would I know that?

- Manager: Just make an educated guess.

- Me: Maybe X months? I really don't know.

- Manager writes down X.

- Me makes a mental note to not trust Manager again...

Maybe it's better to have any plan than to have no plan, but having a plan based on known bad data can't be the solution.

Dear Managers, if your plan requires data that just isn't available, please take the time to ask yoursevles if you are micromanaging. Going with a less concrete plan is definitely better than going with a plan based on wrong assumptions! Maybe you are in a position where deadlines just make no sense and you need to be more agile?

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- Manager: How long would it take to migrate from A to let's say B?

- Me: What do we want to accomplish from the migration? I'm assuming cost reduction?

- Manager: Yeah, the guys at B are much cheaper.

- Me: Ok, give me until EOD Friday to do some investigation.

- Manager: EOD Thursday would be better, don't need a full roadmap, just enough for an ROI. I'll flip over the CEO's spreadsheet that she's using for the calculation.

- Me: This means Feature X is dropping from this sprint.

- Manager: Yep.

Dear Mes: Grow up and participate in the process rather than starting off with snark.

Hah if only managers were that grown up too. I’ve tried those conversations.

Firstly, that Friday deadline likely would have been fine, it was just a power play.

Secondly, when the manager said “yep” to dropping the feature, you’ll still be expected to make progress. (Of course most of the time they try to make you do double the work. A quick “yep” wouldn’t happen IRL)

Get a new manager. Seriously.

It hasn’t been just one manager. I guessed you’d make that assumption though ;)

How many times did you take a task you have no idea of the timeframe, do some short research without completing it and was able to make a correct estimate?

If that happened even once, I would be interested to hear about it.

Literally all the time. Just had exactly this scenario with a technology switch. I spent an hour reviewing their api. We had a meeting with their sales engineer, I asked them a bunch of questions. Estimated 10-12 days to finish phase one integration, was working in single sprint. Larger projects get more upfront investigation and larger error ranges.

That's actually perfectly fine, as long as they don't treat the estimate as a deadline.

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