So the second lecture was on Software Engineering. Big word and unfortunately means big problem. The class was introduced to Agile/Scrum which is a newer methodology compared to the old waterfall/spiral SDLC model that I was taught in school.
I used Agile/Scrum about two years ago in my previous job and my experiences were much similar to the ex-students who presented. I worked with teams from about 2 to 6 in size. Honestly, not many teams can get past 10 pax because of $$$. I must say 80 is an awesome huge group!
So here’s my observations:
- The common effort multiplier is between 2.5 to 3 not because people are slow or bad at estimating, but because they did not consider time taken for communication and other context switching overheads. However as the team gets better and better at estimating their effort this multiplier can go down to about 2. Don’t forget, Project Manager doesn’t do the actual work but still gets paid. 🙂 So where does his effort go?
- The biggest problem with estimating effort is with companies billing by the hour. I was constantly questioned for high estimates (thanks to my 3x multiplier) because it ballooned the cost of a project and I was pressurized to push it down, but guess what? It always overruns, i.e. the original high estimate was correct.
- Agile works well with small projects too, just that you may not need to religiously hold the daily scrums, but the idea of having broken parts down into bite-sizes is the key to easing project management.
Wei Man is right. Geeks are bad at estimating effort, but we have to know what it takes to do something so that we can manage ourselves. Time, energy and life are finite and therefore our efforts are finite as well. If you don’t learn the skill of estimating efforts I can 100% assure you that you’ll overrun your projects. This is from a personal experience from not getting paid and even almost being sued. 🙁
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On the documentation part, Prof. Ben is right. There’s a job market out there with people writing documentation. This type of job is called Technical Writing. If you’re good with language, maybe this is a job you can pursue. There’s not many of these companies around and their clients are usually huge (Aerospace, Military, etc.) so you get paid pretty decent. Not to late to change courses now.
January 21, 2010 at 2:51 am
PS: and in fact I still do. In your experience, how come arr?
January 21, 2010 at 2:50 am
Don’t forget, Project Manager doesn’t do the actual work but still gets paid. 🙂 So where does his effort go?
I found this remarkably curious, at the time. Do you know why this is so?
January 21, 2010 at 11:42 am
Well in my previous job, as a PM I would have to put my hours into the specific tasks (backlog) that was being done by others, e.g. I spent 1 hour talking with you on the new Facebook API. This would balloon your hours, e.g. you said building a profile tab takes 3 hours, but now that we’ve spent 1 hour talking, the task becomes 5 hours (3 +1 you +1 me). In between, you went to lao sai or la kopi. Now the 3x multiplier becomes a little more obvious!
There’s also a general project management task for high level meetings. That’s because the effort (hours) is also used for billing – that’s how the PMs get paid. But I think this only applies to companies billing by the hour. Project-based billing shouldn’t need to do this. Basically it’s abusing the system to do time-charge.
January 19, 2010 at 12:14 pm
Thanks for sharing your insights from working life. 🙂
January 21, 2010 at 12:32 am
Most welcome. 🙂