Everyone wants a fixed price estimate – the building analogy.
If you have a technology project or a technical idea you want turned into a real product or service, it’s not unreasonable to want your technology team to provide you an estimate of how much time and effort it will take to achieve.
They are quite likely going to tell you its hard to estimate and may outline the technical background to you to explain why – this is often a hard conversation.
To try to provide perspective it can help to look at an analogy – although you may not understand technology as well as your development team or development partners, you probably do understand buildings as well as they do.
You know that there is not a simple cost to develop a building that covers all buildings, from a garden shed to a national opera house. For the same reason you should be suspicious of any fixed answer for the effort to develop an app, a web page or an end to end technical solution.
Similarly, on the development planning side, you know that if the first iteration of your building is a three story 10 bedroom house, it is pretty unlikely the fourth iteration is going to be a courtyard bungalow.
Ultimately to get as accurate an estimate as possible, with the caveat that the accuracy is often +/- 100% or more for complex projects, you need to be able to describe as accurately as possible what you want.
For a building it’s clearly important to describe the size, materials layout, special features etc, and the same applies to technology projects.
And even though ‘it is only software’, unless you are prepared to go back to the drawing board at some points some of the early decisions will have a significant influence on the final solution.
If you really don’t know whether you want a high rise, an underground house or a converted barn discuss this openly with your development team and consider building rough prototypes of each.
And while discussing, always be wary of process fundamentalists – if someone tells you that you can’t have a door there or you can’t discuss a wall size because of the process, get ready to run…