Effort Estimation That Doesn’t Lie: Size, Risk, and Coordination Cost

{
  "id": "ams-026",
  "title": "Effort Estimation That Doesn’t Lie: Size, Risk, and Coordination Cost",
  "hook": "In SAP AMS, bad estimates don’t just miss deadlines — they create chaos: wrong priorities, broken approvals, and hidden risk.",
  "idea": "Modern AMS estimates are not ‘hours’. They are a decision tool: size + risk + dependencies + verification cost. The goal is predictable flow, not perfect prediction.",
  "sap_specific_truth": {
    "why_effort_is_hard": [
      "Hidden dependencies (interfaces, roles, master data, country variants)",
      "Transport/test overhead dominates the actual config change",
      "‘Small’ changes break big flows due to shared configuration",
      "Coordination time often exceeds build time"
    ],
    "what_old_estimations_miss": [
      "Blast radius",
      "Testing and evidence generation",
      "Rollback planning",
      "Cross-team handoffs"
    ]
  },
  "estimation_model": {
    "estimate_dimensions": [
      {
        "name": "Size",
        "scale": [
          "XS",
          "S",
          "M",
          "L",
          "XL"
        ],
        "meaning": "How much work content exists (config/code/data + documentation)."
      },
      {
        "name": "Risk",
        "scale": [
          "low",
          "medium",
          "high"
        ],
        "meaning": "How likely it is to cause incidents or require rollback."
      },
      {
        "name": "Coordination",
        "scale": [
          "solo",
          "few",
          "many"
        ],
        "meaning": "How many parties must align (domains/vendors/business)."
      },
      {
        "name": "Verification",
        "scale": [
          "light",
          "standard",
          "heavy"
        ],
        "meaning": "How much testing/evidence is needed to sleep at night."
      }
    ],
    "simple_output": "Estimate = (Size) + (Risk) + (Coordination) + (Verification) => delivery class and planning slot"
  },
  "delivery_classes": [
    {
      "class": "Standard Change",
      "entry_criteria": [
        "low risk",
        "repeatable",
        "pre-approved tests and rollback"
      ],
      "planning": "Fast lane, same week"
    },
    {
      "class": "Normal Change",
      "entry_criteria": [
        "medium risk or dependencies",
        "needs targeted regression",
        "clear blast radius"
      ],
      "planning": "Planned slot with evidence gate"
    },
    {
      "class": "High-Risk Change",
      "entry_criteria": [
        "core posting impact OR wide blast radius",
        "heavy verification",
        "rollback complexity"
      ],
      "planning": "Dedicated window, freeze noise around it"
    }
  ],
  "estimation_rules": [
    "If blast radius is unknown, the estimate is automatically ‘bigger’.",
    "If dependencies are unclear, add coordination buffer — don’t hide it.",
    "Testing is not optional effort — it’s the price of change in SAP.",
    "If an item is repeatedly ‘surprising’, the estimation model is missing a dimension."
  ],
  "prioritization_logic": {
    "inputs": [
      "Business impact (blocked flow, financial risk, user count)",
      "Repeat frequency (demand driver strength)",
      "Risk of change (blast radius)",
      "Cost of delay (what happens if we do nothing for 2 weeks)",
      "Strategic value (reduces AMS load / reduces lock-in / improves upgrade safety)"
    ],
    "decision_rules": [
      "High impact + high repeat beats everything (it’s compound cost).",
      "Low impact + high coordination is a trap — challenge it hard.",
      "If a change increases lock-in or custom complexity, require stronger ROI."
    ]
  },
  "boards_and_planning": {
    "boards": [
      {
        "name": "Triage Board",
        "purpose": "Classify + route + assign owner within minutes/hours",
        "columns": [
          "new",
          "needs-evidence",
          "owned",
          "waiting-dependency",
          "resolved",
          "converted-to-problem"
        ]
      },
      {
        "name": "Problem Elimination Board",
        "purpose": "Kill recurrence (the load-killing engine)",
        "columns": [
          "candidate",
          "measured",
          "root-cause",
          "fix-design",
          "implemented",
          "verified-no-repeat"
        ]
      },
      {
        "name": "Change Board",
        "purpose": "Deliver safely with gates",
        "columns": [
          "intake",
          "design",
          "ready-for-test",
          "test-evidence",
          "ready-for-deploy",
          "deployed",
          "verified"
        ]
      }
    ],
    "wip_limits": [
      "Limit active Problems per domain (prevention needs focus).",
      "Limit active Changes per release window (quality > volume)."
    ],
    "cadence": [
      "Daily: triage decisions only (owner, next step, next update time).",
      "Weekly: commit to a small set of Problems (load-killers) + planned changes.",
      "Monthly: rebalance based on demand drivers and cost-to-serve."
    ]
  },
  "approvals_in_planning": {
    "principle": "Approvals trigger when risk triggers, not when someone feels nervous.",
    "gates": [
      "Ready gate: requirements + evidence completeness",
      "Test gate: traceability + negative cases",
      "Deploy gate: rollback + verification checks",
      "Close gate: business verification + learning artifact created"
    ]
  },
  "handover_and_transfer_in_work": {
    "rule": "Every handover must transfer: (facts, hypothesis, next checks, owner ask).",
    "handover_packet": [
      "What happened (timeline)",
      "What we know (evidence)",
      "What we think (hypothesis)",
      "What we need (specific action)",
      "What we will do next (if dependency blocks)"
    ],
    "why_it_matters": "This prevents ping-pong and protects velocity under pressure."
  },
  "automation": {
    "copilot_moves": [
      "Suggest Size/Risk/Coordination/Verification ratings based on similar historical items.",
      "Auto-detect dependencies from objects mentioned (interfaces, roles, plants, company codes).",
      "Generate a planning card: risks, tests, rollout and verification.",
      "Highlight estimation drift and explain why it happened (missing blast radius, unknown dependency)."
    ],
    "outputs": [
      "Effort class recommendation",
      "Auto-created board cards with correct fields",
      "Weekly planning summary with trade-offs"
    ]
  },
  "anti_patterns_to_kill": [
    "Estimating only build effort and ignoring test/coordination",
    "Overloading the week with ‘small’ changes that create regressions",
    "No WIP limits → everything half-done",
    "Handover by forwarding a ticket link"
  ],
  "metrics_that_prove_maturity": [
    "Estimate accuracy by class (standard/normal/high-risk)",
    "Planning stability (committed vs delivered)",
    "WIP and cycle time trends",
    "Percent of work spent on top demand drivers",
    "Handover count per item (lower is better)"
  ],
  "design_question": [
    "Are we planning work — or are we just scheduling surprises?"
  ],
  "meta": {
    "schema": "dkharlanau.dataset.byte",
    "schema_version": "1.1",
    "dataset": "ams",
    "source_project": "cv-ai",
    "source_path": "ams/ams-026.json",
    "generated_at_utc": "2026-02-03T14:33:32+00:00",
    "creator": {
      "name": "Dzmitryi Kharlanau",
      "role": "SAP Lead",
      "website": "https://dkharlanau.github.io",
      "linkedin": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/dkharlanau"
    },
    "attribution": {
      "attribution_required": true,
      "preferred_citation": "Dzmitryi Kharlanau (SAP Lead). Dataset bytes: https://dkharlanau.github.io"
    },
    "license": {
      "name": "",
      "spdx": "",
      "url": ""
    },
    "links": {
      "website": "https://dkharlanau.github.io",
      "linkedin": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/dkharlanau"
    },
    "contact": {
      "preferred": "linkedin",
      "linkedin": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/dkharlanau"
    },
    "canonical_url": "https://dkharlanau.github.io/datasets/ams/ams-026.json",
    "created_at_utc": "2026-02-03T14:33:32+00:00",
    "updated_at_utc": "2026-02-03T15:29:02+00:00",
    "provenance": {
      "source_type": "chat_export_extraction",
      "note": "Extracted and curated by Dzmitryi Kharlanau; enriched for attribution and crawler indexing."
    },
    "entity_type": "ams_byte",
    "entity_subtype": "",
    "summary": "In SAP AMS, bad estimates don’t just miss deadlines — they create chaos: wrong priorities, broken approvals, and hidden risk."
  }
}