Too busy to read?

Remember that almost everything will take more time and cost more money than you expect. Virtually nothing goes according to plan because one doesn't plan for the things that go wrong. I personally assume things will take about one and a half times as long and cost about one and a half times as much because that's what I've typically experienced.

The prevalence of noise: Almost everything is noise, and a very few things are exceptionally valuable. This is the justification for taking time to figure out what is most important. Because some things are so much more important, the effort in finding those things is worth it.

For some years I have been successfully using the following rule of thumb for scheduling a software task: 1/3 planning 1/6 coding 1/4 component test and early system test 1/4 system test, all components in hand.

John Lennon once said, "Life is what's happening while we're busy making other plans."

Becoming more predictable means we need to talk about probability and how, once we are able to shift to a more probabilistic approach, expectations around timeframes can be improved. It's all about the expectations. Setting better expectations makes leadership happy and helps make those uncomfortable stand-ups and retrospectives surprisingly fun.

There will always be unplanned work, therefore you should plan for unplanned work. Knowing the ratio of unplanned work to planned work helps you plan workload capacity.

The procedure is simple: when the organization has almost come to an important decision but has not formally committed itself, Klein proposes gathering for a brief session a group of individuals who are knowledgeable about the decision. The premise of the session is a short speech: "Imagine that we are a year into the future. We implemented the plan as it now exists. The outcome was a disaster. Please take 5 to 10 minutes to write a brief history of that disaster."

"If you find yourself in a fair fight, you didn't plan your mission properly."

"Know before you go."

"A budget reserve is to contractors as red meat is to lions, and they will devour it."

Using such distributional information from other ventures similar to that being forecasted is called taking an "outside view" and is the cure to the planning fallacy.