Sometimes conversations on Twitter seem like they are "Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing." Certainly some of the tweets around the hashtag #NoEstimate can feel like that sometimes. Is this a bunch of developers stubbornly refusing to engage with the businesses that employ them, being irresponsible with the money their work costs, eschewing accountability and shrugging their shoulders saying "Don't know"? Or is it something more in the spirit of Agile, where some folks working in software acknowledge that the use of estimates in software development can be problematic and lead to dysfunction if misused, and are looking for alternative approaches to managing the delivery of working software to those who need it? In a similar vein, all of us will have experienced complex software work as being treated as a Project, and hence Project Management techniques being deployed to ensure the work is done on time, on budget and to specification. Is this the best means of doing so? #NoProjects suggests otherwise and I’ll take a look at why. Finally we’ll draw together what these challenges to orthodoxy mean for the future of work in the 21st Century.

In this talk Jon will present a case study where Equal Experts were engaged with a large finance client to deliver new versions of their payment service while improving their delivery practices and supporting an 'agile transformation'. There were many attempts to introduce new working practices, tools and techniques. One change in particular was orders of magnitude more effective than any other and proved the catalyst for embedding most of the change that had failed to stick before.