Explicit Pad

The use of an explicit pad is to manage risk. Often tasks are known ahead of time to be very risky. Some management refuses to accept pads which leads to MeaninglessTasks, but instead the use of explicit pads is preferred. This is a practice which seems to be used at Microsoft and wisely acknowledges that some tasks are too risky not to explicitly budget time to do it again. -- RaySchneider

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On ChryslerComprehensiveCompensation we have a few tricks that relate to this:

1. We estimate tasks by analogy with others, using the history of the other to predict the new. This reduces the variance from "no idea" to "some idea".
2. We estimate the number of tasks that we do not yet have in hand, and factor the size of the plan accordingly. This is more acceptable to management as an ExplicitPad.
3. We use SpikeSolution early on to find out how easy or hard a risky task is. We call this WorstThingsFirst.

-- RonJeffries