While everyone is endlessly and pointlessly arguing between flavours of scrum, agile and kanban, the truth is that a much better method of dealing with project uncertainty has been available for over half of century:
“The program (or project) evaluation and review technique (PERT) is a statistical tool used in project management, which was designed to analyze and represent the tasks involved in completing a given project. First developed by the United States Navy in 1958, it is commonly used in conjunction with the critical path method (CPM) that was introduced in 1957.”
Nonetheless, most organizations do not have the capability to efficiently execute the data collection steps required in PERT, most application developers and product managers for project management tools “don’t like math” and think “algebra is useless”. Last but not least, the distrust between the employee and the employer represents a gap in forming and upholding the discipline required for one “to trust the process” to an extent as to willingly accept the decision of a machine (even if it turns out to be a closer to the desired outcome in the desired time span / budget).
This is a bottleneck of professional etiquette and organizational-function literacy that we must overcome before rejoicing the fruit that grows higher up in the tree of knowledge, such as automated, artificial and augmented intelligence (AAAI*).
Read more about PERT here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_evaluation_and_review_technique
