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Estimates are a fact of life for most of us. And often – while not always – they are a necessity. If I weren’t using some form of estimation on my current projects, they would be twisted up like Sherman bow ties. And on fire.
This brings us to an apparent paradox:
What if you can plan for a few weeks or even a month or more at a time? You don't need the extremely short feedback cycles (hours to a day) because you're not doing high innovation. You don't need to change what the team does every few days.
You can estimate and commit to maybe a month's work at a time. On the other hand, you need to change your work more often than a two- or three-month period. That much estimation seems like a waste. And the commitment part? You laugh at that. You might like to commit, but you need to change.
Before you begin to build a house and break ground on the foundation you better have a blueprint and know exactly what you’re going to build. In physical construction, we really need to plan things out ahead of time to ensure that we have the right materials at hand and that things come together as we want them to.
This is a fundamental constraint of physical construction and it forces us to think about and construct physical things in certain ways. Virtual things do not have the same limitations and so in many cases, we can find more effective and efficient ways of constructing virtual things then if we were to just follow a similar plan that we would for constructing a physical thing.