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We made a large, complicated and important production change this weekend.
Things didn’t run as smoothly as planned and our engineers and developers had to burn the midnight oil to get us over the line.
We made a large, complicated and important production change this weekend.
Things didn’t run as smoothly as planned and our engineers and developers had to burn the midnight oil to get us over the line.
Yesterday we did a review to try and understand why some of the items on our run sheet took so much longer than hoped.
Turns out the answer is in the question. Hoped. When it comes to estimating timelines, hope is a dangerous word.
Our planning was overly optimistic. It’s hard to make failure part of your plan and so one typically doesn’t. We did build in some fat, but nowhere near enough.
It’s meant to be funny but Yogi Berra hit the nail on the head when he said that “prediction is very hard, especially of the future".
So we fell victim to a classic case of optimism bias. The big question: How will this experience help us do better next time? The answer is to make use of something called a base rate.
Say a year from now we do something similar. Before looking at the actual work and estimating timeframes, we take this recent experience and assume the new timeline will be identical.
This is our “base rate”. From there we can make minor adjustments up or down based on the known specifics.
Base rate.
Google it. Understand it. Start using it.
Things didn’t run as smoothly as planned and our engineers and developers had to burn the midnight oil to get us over the line.
Yesterday we did a review to try and understand why some of the items on our run sheet took so much longer than hoped.
Turns out the answer is in the question. Hoped. When it comes to estimating timelines, hope is a dangerous word.
Our planning was overly optimistic. It’s hard to make failure part of your plan and so one typically doesn’t. We did build in some fat, but nowhere near enough.
It’s meant to be funny but Yogi Berra hit the nail on the head when he said that “prediction is very hard, especially of the future".
So we fell victim to a classic case of optimism bias. The big question: How will this experience help us do better next time? The answer is to make use of something called a base rate.
Say a year from now we do something similar. Before looking at the actual work and estimating timeframes, we take this recent experience and assume the new timeline will be identical.
This is our “base rate”. From there we can make minor adjustments up or down based on the known specifics.
Base rate.
Google it. Understand it. Start using it.