Providing Slack at the project level instead of the task level is a really good idea, and has worked well in many fields outside of programming. It is analogous to the concept of insurance: the RoI on Slack is higher when you aggregate many events with at least partially uncorrelated errors.
One major problem with trying to fix estimates at the task level is that there are strong incentives not to finish a task too early. For example, if you estimated 6 weeks, and are almost done after 3, and something moderately urgent comes up, you’re more likely to switch and fix that urgent thing since you have time. On the other hand, if you estimated 4 weeks, you’re more likely to delay the other task (or ask someone else to do it).
As a result, I’ve found that teams are literally likely to finish projects faster with higher quality if you estimate the project as, say, 8 3-week tasks with 24 weeks of overall slack (so 48 weeks total) than if you estimate the project as a 8 6-week tasks.
This is somewhat counterintuitive but really easy to apply in practice if you have a bit of social capital.
Providing Slack at the project level instead of the task level is a really good idea, and has worked well in many fields outside of programming. It is analogous to the concept of insurance: the RoI on Slack is higher when you aggregate many events with at least partially uncorrelated errors.
One major problem with trying to fix estimates at the task level is that there are strong incentives not to finish a task too early. For example, if you estimated 6 weeks, and are almost done after 3, and something moderately urgent comes up, you’re more likely to switch and fix that urgent thing since you have time. On the other hand, if you estimated 4 weeks, you’re more likely to delay the other task (or ask someone else to do it).
As a result, I’ve found that teams are literally likely to finish projects faster with higher quality if you estimate the project as, say, 8 3-week tasks with 24 weeks of overall slack (so 48 weeks total) than if you estimate the project as a 8 6-week tasks.
This is somewhat counterintuitive but really easy to apply in practice if you have a bit of social capital.