hanselman posts up a podcast for you guys to listen to

Meanwhile, i want to share a little story.

I was working for a little start-up tech company that's been in the business for a few years. I had moved to part time and was working at home, maintaining my own backlog of functionality out of the massive requirements documentation they had. Using the specs and use cases i setup acceptance criteria for each item and estimated each item using relative points then i began working top down 1 through 80 or so.

After two weeks into it, the project manager called me for a status update and i looked at my spreadsheet and could clearly see that i was 18% done and i said "yea i'm 18% done".

"Oh my, he said. That's certainly a serious issue. When do you expect you'll be finished."

"9 more weeks, maybe as few as 8"

"But we have to finish in 1 month"

"well if nothing changes, i'll be done in 9 maybe 8"

"well the other developers say they're 90% done"

"can they take some of my work load?"

"no they cannot"

So we ended the call and another two weeks went by.

"how are things going?"

"Ironically, i'm 38% complete. I'm actually picking up pace."

"Oh dear, 38%? that's not good"

"how are the other developers doing"

"They're at 90%"

"Still?"

Anyhow, this time he did take the rest of my scope away and gave it to the other developers to finish, since they were so close to being "Done".

My brother calls this "Faith based project management".

I call it "Lying", but i'm not known for my wordsmithing.