On Estimating how long something will take
Day 4: “I cannae change the laws of physics”
We've all been there. You're asked how long something will take. So you take the nearest equivalent to what you're being asked and calibrate it to the situation.
Quite often this first estimate meets with disapprobation. At which point you decompose the stages needed and consider the range of duration for each stage. Don't do this! – someone will come along and take the shortest range for each element and add them together to come up with an “optimistic” overall estimate. This isn't “optimistic”, each of the ranges has been treated optimistically, so if there are 10 components then this is optimistic to the power of ten. You may then be asked to shorten this duration still further: “If we start this before its pre-requisites are ready and slot them in...”
In my career I have never known a project estimated in this way to arrive on time.
So the first estimate for “How long will it take to provide a vaccine for a new virus” would be “Between ten and fifteen years, maybe longer”.
Which brings me to this piece. The opening paragraph contains the simple sentence “We've never released a coronavirus vaccine for humans before.” And then we look at all the short cuts that must be made, the “assume the best case” that must work at each stage ... to get to a vaccine within a decade.
Whenever you hear the words ”...until we have a vaccine” think of a project where you were bamboozled into saying it could be done in a compressed timescale, and then remember what the outcome was.