I live in an apartment building called Skinner. It’s part of a former school campus that was originally built in the early 1900’s and was later converted into apartments and a corporate office. 

The property is managed by a dedicated crew. On Monday, I heard one of the supervisors say to the team, “I want to get Skinner in good shape this week.”

And that was essentially that.

The crew knows what good shape means and what’s involved—planting, trimming, tidying.

And now they know the appetite is a week. It’s not worth spending a month getting Skinner in shape, but two days won’t get it where it needs to be either.

It sounds simple, but like a lot of work, it’s a project with multiple people and dependencies. They may not have enough plants, mulch, and fertilizer. They may need to rent some equipment. Someone might be pulled into another project. 

There's a rough outline of what they want to accomplish, but it could change as they go. Maybe something is worth spending more time on and something else can be cut. Maybe they finish a day early or it rains for two days. 

In other words, there are risks and unknowns, and some margin to make it work. It’s all pretty familiar. 

But there’s zero ceremony. No one broke the project down into small slices and then estimated how long each would take. No backlogs were pruned. There's not a Gantt chart or story points.

They chose a priority, set the appetite, pointed the team in the right direction, and trusted them to take it from there.

Are there a thousand reasons why some projects need more than that? Sure. 

Are there are also thousands of projects that need that much and no more? Absolutely.