Week 937

Matt Kirkland

It's Week 937!

One of my 2024 goals is to start a little Book Report series with Brand New Box; I finally kicked that off this week.

I read a lot. Probably too much. But while I don't enjoy 'business' books, I do still read some when they come highly recommended. But most business books aren't worth your time, and are really just long blog posts that got a lot of extra padding. So I'm going to leverage this consumption habit of mine, and make sure that I share it with our broader team.

This week was the first edition of "BNB Book Report: Matt Reads Business Books So You Don't Have To" - in which I give a ten minute summary to the team. My target for the year was 12 books and 12 reports. I'm on target for the reading part, but this was my first week of actually reporting to the team. I hope this is useful!

First up: How Big Things Get Done, by Bent Flyvbjerg. I'll spare the book report here, but one standout takeaway was about estimating. Flyvbjerg recommends something that instead of estimating from the ground up, you 'anchor-and-adjust' your estimates. To estimate a kitcen remodel from the ground up, you could calculate how many square feet are in your kitchen remodel, figure out tile costs x square feed, add the countertops, and the appliances, and the cabinet estimates, etc. This feels like it should be accurate, but it just doesn't do a good job: surprises come up, you can't plan for everything. Exigencies arise. Scope creeps.

Instead, you should 'anchor-and-adjust': just find out what past remodels of a similar scale have cost, find an average range, and then adjust up or down if you know that you've got different circumstances.

We kind of already do this at BNB when we estimate new projects! We talk about new projects in relation to past projects: like 'This feels TASN-sized' or 'Neumz-sized'. I've got a rough spreadsheet model of S, M, L, and XL projects, and we first try to anchor new projects.

It's not bulletproof - but it's a start, and it's gratifying to see some experts recommend the same thing.