3 Days With The Master Coach

Tuesday, Wednesday and today were nearly a blur at work this week, as I spent almost all of my time with the Master Coach consultant who started his eight-week stint just minutes after I got back into the office on Tuesday. There was precious little time to catch my breath before it was right into three days of intense meetings, during which I did my best to bring him up to speed on our Agile progress so far, while also trying to keep pace with all of the ideas and concepts being thrown around in terms of what areas we should possibly be focusing on more.

One somewhat contentious topic between us was estimating. The consultant's stance is that you don't necessarily have to get good at estimating to succeed in an Agile organization (as I was asserting); you simply have to get consistent at it. In hindsight, I think we may've both been saying the same thing, just differently, but it certainly didn't feel that way at the time. To me, "getting good" at estimating simply means that you're becoming reasonably accurate at assessing how long something will take before you do it, whereas the Master Coach kept saying that that doesn't really matter. I think what he meant was that, if whenever you say something will take 2 hours it always ends up taking 10 hours, and anything you estimate at 4 hours ends up requiring 20 hours, then that's consistent enough that you can succeed with it. In fact, you'd actually be better off using some sort of abstract units that aren't hours, because then it's clearer that there's a mapping function involved. And I can understand that and get behind it.

But the point I kept coming back to was: in our work environment, there isn't much of that kind of reflection happening (yet), regardless of what the units being used are! In other words, most teams estimate a task (in hours, say) and then take a certain amount of time to complete it, but don't necessarily compare the two in order to find that mapping function, or to determine that no mapping is required ("2 hours really means 2 hours"). The discipline to do that, and learn from it, is what's lacking, and that's really what I mean when I say, "get better" at estimating. If I'd realized that while we were having the conversation, things probably would've gone better at the time!

Overall, though, I'm fairly impressed with what he brings to the table, and have high hopes that we're going to learn a lot from him during his engagement with us. I don't think I've ever gone through a period in my career where I've had to stretch as much as I'm doing right now, but I guess that's all part of being a so-called Agile Manager!