In one sense, units don’t matter at all. In another they are critical. It’s all human psych.
The fundamental problem is a cognitive bias termed the Planning Fallacy. This well-documented bias shows that the human brain, even with training, always estimates outcomes on the information it knows. We have a well-researched, systemic bias that causes us to consistently under-estimate, even when we take this bias into account during estimation.
In the Agile world, we accidentally discovered a system that works around that bias. But most of us don’t know that we’re applying it, and the others don’t see why they should. Continue reading “Planning with any hope of accuracy”