I was responding to the comment that established "X must be done in time T" or the company fails.
In a perfect world, estimates would come before deciding to proceed, but in 95% of the places I've ever worked, the project necessity is decided first and the estimates are asked for afterwards.
In reality, the project often settles for a shoddy subset of the original vision in order to make an arbitrary date, when they could have had the same exact subset at much higher quality if they had merely proceeded with the important parts first in a lean/agile manner, using micro-estimates (if bothering to estimate at all).
A bigger problem with estimating the solution of unknown problems is that confidence in the estimate varies inversely with the precision (or usefulness) of the estimate. I could estimate all my projects with 99% confidence as "somewhere between 1 day and 1 year".
That's not a useful estimate.
Or I could estimate "this will take 42 days" and be wrong 99% of the time.
In a perfect world, estimates would come before deciding to proceed, but in 95% of the places I've ever worked, the project necessity is decided first and the estimates are asked for afterwards.
In reality, the project often settles for a shoddy subset of the original vision in order to make an arbitrary date, when they could have had the same exact subset at much higher quality if they had merely proceeded with the important parts first in a lean/agile manner, using micro-estimates (if bothering to estimate at all).
A bigger problem with estimating the solution of unknown problems is that confidence in the estimate varies inversely with the precision (or usefulness) of the estimate. I could estimate all my projects with 99% confidence as "somewhere between 1 day and 1 year".
That's not a useful estimate.
Or I could estimate "this will take 42 days" and be wrong 99% of the time.