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harder to pad them when sitting at a table with everyone else on the team, knowing that
one’s estimates might be challenged and would have to be justified on the spot.

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Some project managers respond to an unrealistic deadline by creating “estimates” that are
too low but that meet it. Sometimes a team makes up for their project manager’s poor
estimates through enormous effort and overtime. When this happens, those poor esti-
mates become a self-fulfilling prophecy—instead of being an honest assessment of the
work that the team expects to do, the estimate turns into a series of baseless deadlines that
the team must meet. The team never agreed to these deadlines, nor did they have any
input into them; when this happens, the team will begin to resent their project manager.
This is especially common when the top programmer is promoted to project manager, and
fails to take into account the fact that he works faster than the rest of the team. (When
this happens, the project manager’s bond with other programmers will make it more
likely for them to agree to the deadline and work much harder.) But any project manager
is susceptible to this problem.
Typically, the self-fulfilling prophecy happens when the project manager is the sole source
of estimates. He will create a project schedule with aggressive deadlines. Often, he will set
the deadline first, and then work backward to fill in the tasks. The effort required to perform
each task is not taken into account, nor is the relative expertise of each team member.

If the deadlines are too aggressive but not entirely impossible, the team will work to meet
them. This may seem like a good thing to the project manager—he was able to get more
work out of the team. But, as the team begins to burn out, they start to realize that they
are working toward an unrealistic project schedule. The project does not go smoothly.
Instead, it alternates between normal working time and crunch periods, and there is little
advance warning before the crunch periods begin.
The first few times that the team meets an unrealistic schedule by working nights and
weekends, they are happy to have met the deadline. But each time this happens, the
project manager’s undeservedly high opinion of his own estimating skills is reinforced.
Eventually, the team gets disillusioned and bitter, and the sense of camaraderie that was

forged over the many late nights and high-pressure assignments is overwhelmed by anger
and frustration.
Had the project manager used a consensus-driven estimation process, the team would
have been able to go into the project with a real understanding of what would be asked of
them. They would know at the outset that the project would require crunch periods, and
would be able to plan their lives around them instead of being blindsided by them. And
the project manager would be able to keep the team together, without causing them to
feel bitter or exploited.

ESTIMATION 51