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Comment by xyzzy123 | Hacker News Reader

The tension is fundamental and comes from a perfectly reasonable desire to know how much things will cost, how long things will take and what they will get at the end.

Adequately communicating, negotiating and managing the uncertainty is the core part of agile, "do what you want" isn't going to fly, that's why teams don't have complete agency on process.

I agree the politics and "fog of war" in large companies is tiresome and wasteful but it seems to be almost unavoidable once you get to a certain size.

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Good take. Just want to add that the problem is “how long things will take” is always a guess when formulated as a single number or date and in reality something more like a probability distribution subject to many foreseen and unforeseen forces.

That’s where the fundamental mismatch between corporate planning and Agile lies. Agile is supposed to be resilient to known and unknown unknowns, but corporate planning usually isn’t - as you mention due to very real constraints like cost and opportunity costs and so forth. It’s why you essentially can’t do “true-agile” in basically any corporate setting IMO.

Back when I was solo consulting and not inside the sausage factory I would provide cost ranges to clients who wanted fixed price (vs hourly). If they wanted a firm price they got the +3-sigma estimate. After doing that for a few years and successfully coming in within budget but not always on the timeline people were expecting I split it into separate estimate ranges for both cost and schedule. It took some time to really nail down how many billable hours there would actually be in a week, which is why cost and calendar had to be decoupled.

I do still laugh about the fact that I could take a complex problem and break it down with hour estimates well enough to not end up being significantly over or under at the project level but then struggled really hard at figuring out how many hours there actually were in a day to put the calendar together. There’s always things that pop up that rob calendar time and virtually never things that free up calendar time.

> The tension is fundamental and comes from a perfectly reasonable desire to know how much things will cost, how long things will take and what they will get at the end.

Then they should buy their software off the shelf and resist the desire to customise it. For most enterprises building their own software makes about as much sense as building their own vehicle fleet.

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