Size and sequence delivery with a wave plan

The estimate everyone dreads

Asked how long a body of work will take, most people either lowball a gut number or freeze. The honest answer needs structure: what kinds of work are in here, how much of each, how expensive is each kind, and what has to happen before what.

Treating every item as equally expensive is the classic mistake — it either wildly overestimates or hides the real bottleneck.

Buckets, sizes, and waves

Cadenly's Delivery Plan reads your board, risks, and notes, then classifies the approach (triage, sequence, or hybrid), derives the effort buckets that actually fit this work — not a fixed set — sizes each by count and ideal-days-per-item, and lays out a wave plan that names the single factor limiting parallelism.

The buckets are an editable table with live totals, so you can adjust a count or a rate and watch the estimate move. It's a plan you can defend and change, not a number you made up.

An honest savings figure

When the work genuinely varies in effort, the plan shows how much you save by triaging instead of treating everything as the most expensive bucket — and when it doesn't vary, it doesn't show a fake savings number. Honest math beats an impressive-looking one.