Day estimates and the length of strings...

If one more person comes to me and asks for an estimate on how long it will take to do some work, without being able to tel me anything about the work or allowing me to specify it in any way, then I might just have to kill them.

I wasn't going to post about this, but one of the people involved in this persuaded me that I should and the more I think about this, the more I feel the need to talk about it (or basically to vent).

This has been building for some time, more and more over the last few years I have been asked to provide day estimates for unspecified work. In a lot of cases this is somewhat understandable given the type of work that we do. We are often responding to open tenders for public organisations and therefore they expect a fixed price contract, with that price fixed well before any specification work has begun. But recently several people have started asking me for estimates on work that could be specified, if only the project/client was managed better. These are estimates for clients we have a very good relationship with, people with whom, I am almost certain, we could take the time to explain the benefits of proper specification.

I should give you some examples of just how bad things have gotten. A project I recently worked on was delayed, on the client's request, becauee they were having meetings and agreeing things with their clients and partners. We were working on a time and materials contract, which was still to be signed, therefore I wasn't allowed to do any work. I had placed a period of specification work, into the project plan, that had to happen before any practical development take place. As it was the client who was delaying things people at our end were not that concerned, but I was. We knew that our client had immovable delivery dates with their clients, which meant that in reality the length of the project was being squeezed from the front end.

I finally managed to persuade the project manager that, as we were 99% certain to have to do this work, and by the original deadline, that we should begin the specification work. We ended up with less than half the time for this work, which meant I had to deliver very generic wireframes of the GUI. I explained to the client that this was all I had time to do, yet they still requested that I redo them with some real data in them, which pushed us further back.

The lack of proper specification time has added about 20% to the project, the delivery date for our end of which we have had to put back once already. The client has asked for an extension project, and wanted a day estimate based on a few lines of description. The project manager asked me for this and I spent about half an hour explaining to him why there was no way I could give him anything close to accurate figures, and that if he wanted them then I would have to build in such a margin of error that we probably wouldn't get the work. After all of this, after he agreed to go back to the client and explain the situation he said the following;

Project Manager: "So how long would it take to train people to use this?"

...then you could see the bulb over his head lighting up...

Project Manager: "That's a stupid question isn't it, how long will it take to train people on an application for which we have no specification and not a clue what it will look like. I can't ask that can I?"

Me: "No..."

If you think that's bad...

Oh it gets worse, yesterday was the proverbial straw. One of our analysts came to me for a day estimate, with absolutly no warning, no meetings, no meetings booked, nothing. This is how the conversation went;

Analyst: "How long would it take to translate some data?"

Me: "What data?"

Analyst: "An Excel spreadsheet."

Me: "What kind of spreadsheet? What format? Plain sheets or Workbooks?"

Analyst: "I don't know."

Me: "Well how much data?"

Analyst: "I don't know."

Me: "So what format has this got be be translated into?"

Analyst: "XML."

Me: "What specific format? Standards based or do we need to make up a grammer for it?"

Analyst: "Needs to be compatible with [some CMS thing]."

Me: "What does such a format look like?"

Analyst: "I don't know."

Me: "Can you find out?"

Analyst: "Not in time, I need the estimate now."

Me: "Well I just cannot tell you, there is no way that I can estimate that."

Analyst: "I fully understand..." brief pause "...so 10 days then."

I swear I almost ripped his throat out. This isn't a blind tender we are responding to, this company, while technically a client, is actually a strategic partner who we have been working with on this project for months. How on earth can we be in this situation.

The worst part is that these clients are shooting themselves in the foot, and so are we. The lack of specification raises the risk on projects massively, but this is not something that others recognise. There are a lot of people at work who would never ask this, who do understand the risks, but this small pocket of people that consistently ask for these things are driving me up the wall.

I had to write this, to vent my frustrations, but I am wandering if this is a more common problem in the induistry as a whole. Why is it that people will not listen to us developers, we have been doing this stuff for a long time. There is a lot of collective memory and knowledge about how to run these projects, and yet people still refuse to listen.

Let me know what you think, comments and e-mails always welcome.