One of the three values fundamental to the web development worker cooperative NOVA Web Development is, "we want to help build the world we want to live in" (NOVA Web Development, n.d.). I have always loved this value, which strikes me as a good foundation for what can serve as a popular basis for a sound moral philosophy, tangentially related at least to the Golden Rule or Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative. Combining this value with the other two NOVA Web Development values, "we want to make a living, not a killing", and "we want to use the people's software to support the people's movement" (NOVA Web Development, n.d.), gives the cooperative a solid framework for striving to develop the kinds of relationships it wants with to have with its customers. Discussions among cooperative members have often focused on the desire to have relationships with customers and the communities in which we operate based on transparency, trust, and mutual interdependence. Matt Griffin's article, "The Art of Creating Accurate Estimates" (2015, June 18), provides guidance as delightful as it is helpful in how to approach a crucial aspect of building positive relationships with customers - the task of providing them with estimates of what the work they want us to do for them will cost.

Estimating how long a given customer request will take is among the most crucial aspects of both keeping a business viable and maintaining good relationships with customers. Overly optimistic estimates, especially if they are going to be honored when billing customers for service, could result in the business not earning enough revenue to succeed. Overly pessimistic estimates, on the other hand, could drive customers away, again leading to business failure. What is more troubling is that, especially for a newer business run by people with more limited prior experience, oftentimes the estimate has to be given for something the business has never done before. "Is there anything more terrifying in this business than when you have to go on record saying how long it’s going to take to do a thing that (frequently) you’ve never done before?" (Griffin, 2015). Griffin observes that most estimates from inexperienced teams error on the side of optimism, since they tend to ignore the unknowns and the extra work that arises from them. The opposite, pessimistic estimates are characteristic from teams that have been burned by miserable experience with a task similar to the one being estimated, even if the circumstances that led to the misery are unlikely to reoccur.

Griffin suggests two approaches to deal with the terror of estimates. In the scope to time approach, break down the overall task into a series of smaller, hopefully more easily estimated subtasks and sum the estimates of these. He emphasizes the importance of choosing the appropriate timescale to make this work well, saying that the middle timescales days or weeks work much better then timescales that are too small, like minutes or hours, or two big, like months or years.

In the opposite approach, time to scope, you begin with the known project constraints in terms of time and work backwards from there to determine the scope of what can be accomplished within the available time. Budget constraints can be directly converted into time constraints by taking the total budget and dividing by the team's weekly rate.

Griffin says that there are very good reasons for taking this second approach, starting with how beginning from the standpoint of known constraints shifts the team's focus to how to maximize client value within those constraints. "Not surprisingly, this often becomes a conversation" (Griffins, 2015). The conversation in turn leads to trust between the client and the development team, trust which is indeed required if the approach is to be successful, since "Everyone needs to understand that none of us can guarantee exactly what’s going to be delivered at the end of the engagement" (Griffins, 2015). What is attractive to the clients is the greater control they have over the creative process, since they can reprioritize and redirect the development team throughout the project. What is attractive to the development team is that it shifts their focus toward serving the customer. The driving question changes from "Will we ship that thing on time?" to "Is the work we're doing worth more than the money our client is spending on us?" (Griffins, 2025).

I find in Griffin's article evidence of a kindred spirit who wants the kinds of collaborative, caring, and mutually beneficial relationships with other people that I do. The agile, time to scope approach aligns well with NOVA Web Development's value of helping to build the world we want to live in. It likewise aligns well with the values of the solidarity economy, which strives to put people and planet before profits by engaging in democratically directed, win-win cooperation instead of the zero sum, dog eat dog relationships of the capitalist market place. Griffin has provided a delightful to read and incredibly useful article for a young web tech coop like ours in helping us begin to wrap our heads around the incredibly daunting process of estimating our work.

Jeff
25 April 2025