BONUS: Why Your Plan Is Lying to You — #NoEstimates, Throughput, and the Superstition of Project Management
This episode is a cross-post from The EBFC Show, Felipe Engineer-Manriquez's podcast exploring Lean and Agile in construction. In this conversation, Felipe interviews Vasco about the #NoEstimates movement, throughput-based planning, and why traditional project management is still stuck in the middle ages of managing creative work.
The Human Side of Scrum That the Scrum Guide Doesn't Cover
"When you go into a daily meeting and you start looking at the people in that room, maybe they are the exact same people that were there yesterday, but the team is totally different. Somebody might have had a bad night's sleep, somebody might have had an argument with their spouse. These are human beings. These are not machines that you can just distribute work to."
Vasco's path to agile coaching started with a realization that most practitioners eventually reach: the problems in software development aren't technological. They're about people — getting agreements, sharing information at the right time, making the collective brain of a team actually function. The Scrum Guide gives you organizing principles — how many meetings, who's in them — but it says almost nothing about the real-time feedback cycle between humans that makes or breaks a team. That's why the Scrum Master role exists: to be the lubricant for human interactions, to break down complex ideas into items the collective mind can process. It's the piece that makes Scrum work, and it's the piece that's hardest to teach.
From Project Manager to #NoEstimates — The Bet That Changed Everything
"The PM wanted 15 items per sprint, and the team said 'yeah, we can do 15.' I said, this is not gonna happen. The team had been delivering between five and eight items per sprint. I said, I'm gonna be positive — I'm gonna say seven. And no surprise, by the end of the sprint, they delivered seven."
Vasco started as a project manager — and not the easy certification kind. He went through IPMA, which means six months of training, a four-hour written exam, and an expert interview, just for the entry level. Planning and estimating was the job. Then he ran his first Scrum project, specifically to prove it couldn't work. By the second month, he couldn't understand how anything else could work. The team delivered something to show every single sprint — something that never happened with traditional project management. The turning point came when he made a bet with a product manager: the PM needed 15 items per sprint, the team committed to 15, but historical throughput was 5-8 items. Reality delivered seven. That moment crystallized the #NoEstimates insight: we can't fight reality, but we can choose which seven items to deliver.
Reality Is a Bitch — Why Linear Predictive Planning Fails
"Never believe the plan. Or as in Scarface — never get high on your own supply. It's so unbelievable how project managers still today believe their freaking plans."
At Nokia, Vasco managed a program of 500 people across 100 teams on four continents. No way to get everyone in a room. So he tracked system-level throughput — features delivered to integration per week. Six months into a twelve-month project, the data said they'd be at least six months late. He told the program manager: cut scope now. The program manager did what every PMI-trained program manager does — sent an email asking all 100 teams if they'd deliver on time. Every single team said yes. Nobody wants to be first to admit they're late. Twelve months in, they discovered they were six months late. The project got canceled. 500 people, millions of euros, all because somebody believed the plan. Linear predictive planning is useful for exploring what might be possible if nothing goes wrong. It is not reality. The only tool that reflects reality is throughput — the number of items completed per unit of time.
Earned Value Management — George Orwell at His Best
"It's not earned, it's spent. It's not value, it's cost. It's not management, it's just observation. Monty Python could not have come up with a better name."
Felipe shares a story that mirrors the absurdity: an industrial project with a dedicated 35-person earned value management department. Before the meeting even started, the department head announced, "Let's all acknowledge that earned value management is more an art than a science." Their charts were made up, the contractor's charts were made up, and the goal of the meeting was to agree that the project would finish on time — regardless of what any data said. This is where traditional project management ends up when it disconnects from throughput: a $30 million scope addition with zero additional time, defended by charts that a mediocre attorney can invalidate in the first week of litigation. Felipe knows — he spent a year being cross-examined by forensic schedulers whose full-time job is proving that construction schedules are fiction.
One Small Experiment to Test #NoEstimates
"Never convince anyone. Convince yourself. Once you're convinced, whatever other people say, it doesn't really matter because you're not gonna take them seriously anyway."
Here's how to validate throughput-based planning with your own data: take the last 10 sprints (or periods). Calculate the average throughput and control limits from the first five. Then check whether the next five sprints fall within that range. They will. If you're in software and using Jira, you already have this data. You don't need anyone's permission. You don't need to change anything. Just look at what your team actually delivers versus what they planned to deliver. The gap between those two numbers is the gap between superstition and reality.
About Felipe Engineer-Manriquez
Felipe Engineer-Manriquez is a best-selling author, international keynote speaker, Project Delivery Services Director at The Boldt Company, host of The EBFC Show podcast, and a proven construction change-maker implementing Lean and Agile practices on projects from millions to billions of dollars worldwide. He is a Registered Scrum Trainer™ (RST), Registered Scrum Master™ (RSM), and recipient of the Lean Construction Institute Chairman's Award. His book Construction Scrum is the first practical guide for applying Scrum in construction.
You can link with Felipe Engineer-Manriquez on LinkedIn.
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