Readify/madskillz

Business writing, estimation skills

mjhilton opened this issue · 4 comments

The following things are pretty well required of SCs and above, but we never talk about them specifically:

  • Providing written estimations based on discussions with the customer
  • Writing proposals/business cases
  • Cake?

🍰

Probably worth highlighting the additional people management activities/expectations.

We don't have a TL label...

@mjhilton estimation is a nuanced subject :)

I see it breaking down like so:

SC: can perform estimation based on relative sizing and empirical evidence (velocity) to provide estimates for new work to be completed during a project.

PC: can perform 'pre-sales' type estimation without empirical evidence, knows how to estimate for the best chance of success with limited data on-hand. Knows what data they need to gather initially from the customer before they can produce a confident estimate.

LC: Somewhere between these two.

I find people who try and do 'non-empirical' estimation who have not done it much before (or have had to deal with the consequences of it) tend to be far too optimistic.

As for proposals / business cases - while understanding business requirements and translating them into deliverable software seems to be mentioned from SC up, specifically writing props / cases does not seem to be mentioned. As far as expectations - I'd expect an SC to be able to have a crack at doing a proposal or business case, but we don't really require this out of people unless they are contributing to pre-sales, which varies a bit state to state.

As per #105, I'm closing this due to inactivity to reduce the signal-to-noise ratio on the madskillz repo. If you'd like to reopen it in the future, please start a new issue and reference this one to pick it up where it left off.