Work Estimation

Work Estimation

Principle expression

Primary: P07 Supporting: P02, P08, P15

Scope

Own one judgment: given a concrete desired state and evidence, what is the smallest necessary work graph, what resolution can the present decision tolerate, and what remains discovery rather than committed work?

Work is executor-independent. It is not person-days, tokens, dollars, elapsed time, model capability, or a universal point scale. Conversion into resources, human approval of a hard envelope, runtime enforcement, and retrospective calibration belong to their respective owners.

Principle source

Use a host Sequence and matching interpretations when present. Otherwise use this package's read-only fallback in references/sequence.md. Read only P07, P02, P08, and P15 for this skill's stable lineage.

Start

Ground the work before assigning any size:

Current state and source evidence:
Target state / decision to change:
Actor and decision horizon:
Hard constraints and irreversible surface:
Current alternatives, dependencies, and unknowns:
Strongest case for using no estimate or a coarser estimate:

If the decision is one-step, reversible, and no later actor must compare or approve a resource commitment, use ordinary disciplined development. Do not manufacture a work graph.

Core method

1. Recover the concrete state transition. Read the object, its owners, existing evidence, and acceptance boundary. Separate observed work from a hoped-for implementation or an executor's claimed effort.
2. Construct the necessary work graph. Add a node only when it changes a required state, resolves a decision-changing unknown, verifies a hard constraint, or preserves a later settlement. State its dependency and acceptance observation. Do not use a fixed investigation/design/build/test sequence.
3. Separate committed work from discovery branches. A discovery node exists to decide whether later work is needed; it is not hidden contingency. Name the observation that opens or closes each branch and the smallest allocation needed to learn it.
4. Choose decision-derived resolution. Use resolution and tolerance. Estimate only as finely as needed for the current choice. If two alternatives remain indistinguishable within their tolerated uncertainty, route to a bounded discovery practice rather than inventing precision.
5. Return a Work Estimate, not a price. Use the record shape when approval, handoff, or a later comparison requires recovery. Name what an execution projection would need—executor profile, relevant observations, and confidence—but do not fabricate P50/P80/P95 or set a hard cap.
6. Route the next owner. Route resource conversion and hard enforcement to Work Cell/runtime policy; multi-alternative direction to strategic-advisory; post-run calibration to practice-cycle; carrier choice to form-guidance; durable placement to artifact-organization; and semantic insufficiency to principle-cultivation.

Boundaries

• Do not map a work node directly to a Work Cell, person-day, token count, or price. One executor may combine nodes; another may need several attempts.
• Do not hide uncertainty in an undifferentiated percentage buffer. Preserve discovery branches and their opening observations separately.
• Do not use forecast overlap to pretend alternatives are equal. If uncertainty can change the decision, identify the next information-gathering practice.
• Do not approve a Budget Envelope, release a child-cell allocation, or allow a forecast view to accept its own result.
• Do not turn the record into a mandatory plan or universal work-point taxonomy.

Completion standard

The estimate is ready when it names the concrete state transition, necessary nodes, discovery branches, dependencies, resolution/tolerance, omitted work, and a disconfirming observation. It is supported only when an action probe compares real alternatives without using tokens/person-days as work, a boundary probe declines a one-step request or unsupported point forecast, and a context probe reads the object and acceptance boundary rather than an executor price sheet.