In a previous post I talked about how empowerment is one of the most overworked words in management today. Right near the top of that same list is “accountability.” I shudder every time I hear someone in management say “We need greater accountability in our team!” The reason I shudder is because it implies that accountability is a one way street, when in fact for accountability to work it must be a circle.

What do I mean by that?

I want to discuss with you accountability at Menlo around estimating. When people first learn about our weekly estimating practice, the question invariably arises, “What do you do when people don’t hit their estimates?” The answer I give is not what they expect.

I first talk about how we teach accountability around estimating to our team members, and it always occurs in the setting of a public class where Menlonians and clients are both present.

I start with my accountability as a CEO to my team. I do this by declaring to my developers that we will never punish anyone for missing an estimate.

Ever.

I then turn to our project managers and tell them they are never to punish, cajole, or intimidate any of our developers about missed estimates.

I then turn to our clients and say, “By the way, if we go over our estimates, you will pay for the additional hours logged against that story card.” You can imagine the burning question on the client’s mind is either “Why am I here?” or “What’s in it for me?”

This is where the circle must be completed to make accountability work.

I then turn back to my developers and say to them, “There’s one thing I need from you, and only one thing. As soon as you think you’re going to exceed your estimate, raise your hand and declare it to your project manager.” We have actually taught our project managers to say, “Thank you.” (No, really. They say it!) I tell them that it’s okay to ask about their revised estimate, and discuss its implications, but at no point in this conversation is anyone allowed to say, “No. You just need to meet your estimates.”

Armed with the understanding of why the new estimate is now more accurate, the project manager is then taught they must call the client and deliver the news. We don’t assume that the client wants the story card completed at any cost, so we ask them, “What would you like to do?” There are many choices here, including: 1) just keep going and we’ll pull something off the end of the iteration, 2) stop working on the card because the new cost for that story card is not in line with the value it would produce, 3) we review alternative approaches (i.e. new story cards) that may reduce the effort while producing a similar amount of value in a different way than originally planned, or 4) something else. This approach affirms one of our most common statements about agile: Agile doesn’t solve problems, it exposes them sooner so that we can deal with them while there is still time and budget to do so.

So what does the customer get out of this?

In a trusted system of estimating our developers will estimate more aggressively with no padding, and human nature says that our developers will strive to meet or beat an estimate they had a hand in creating. People do miss estimates, and when they do we deal with it in a healthy, professional way. Ultimately the client will get more work done in the same amount of time, which is what every client wants.

I teach this system wherever I go. I can recall a rather tense moment in a class I was teaching in Atlanta, where a VP of Marketing silenced a room by declaring, “This is bullsh*t. Here our people are expected to meet or beat their estimates every time.” I asked him, “And if they don’t, what happens?” He said, “Then they stay late. They come in on the weekend. They forgo holidays. They are responsible for making it work.”

I then asked him the magical question, “What do you think the effect of your system is?” I literally watched his face change from anger to understanding. He said, “Quality will suffer. Morale will drop. People will quit. Those that don’t quit have quit in their minds, but are still on the payroll.”

I caught up with members of his team years later and they said to me, he literally changed that day. He was a different manager from that day forward. I believe estimating, and how it is handled, is one of the most vexing problems of our industry. At the heart of this problem is how we as managers view accountability.

We seldom consider that accountability must begin with us for it to work.