How have you trained your customers to NOT expect estimates?
If you try this sort of thing yourself what you'll often find is that you can get the cycle time of stories (the time from the story going on the board, to the time it gets deployed) to be fairly constant. It can take some work to get top this point, but it's possible and useful in almost all circumstances.
Once you get to this point you can pretty confidently predict that stories are 1week/1month/2months away from getting deployed - and you can use this as the basis you base customer estimates on.
Arlo Belshee coined this style and called it "Disney Line" planning (y'know - like the one-hour wait from this point thing). Arlo has a great video on this sort of approach to planning http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6t4bZtnnQJA that might be worth a watch.
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How have you trained your customers to NOT expect estimates?
If you try this sort of thing yourself what you'll often find is that you can get the cycle time of stories (the time from the story going on the board, to the time it gets deployed) to be fairly constant. It can take some work to get top this point, but it's possible and useful in almost all circumstances.
Once you get to this point you can pretty confidently predict that stories are 1week/1month/2months away from getting deployed - and you can use this as the basis you base customer estimates on.
Arlo Belshee coined this style and called it "Disney Line" planning (y'know - like the one-hour wait from this point thing). Arlo has a great video on this sort of approach to planning http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6t4bZtnnQJA that might be worth a watch.