It isn’t the mountains ahead that wear you out.
It’s the grain of sand in your shoe. —Anonymous

Power may be associated with many things, but in the Change Leadership Framework, power is a measure of effort. Physicists define power as the amount of work performed over time.
Power=work/time

If one change requires two months working every day to complete and another change requires one month working every day, then the first change requires twice the power. Another way to think about it is if both changes were to be completed in one month, then the first change would require twice as much power.

The unit of measure for power is a “watt.” A change that requires a lot of effort could be referred to as a “high-wattage change.” For example, the electrical power generated by the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River is about two thousand megawatts. So when your boss assigns you a new project, you could say, “Oh, that’s a Hooverwatt change! We’ll have to harness the power of the Colorado River to accomplish that!” Or you could say, “Oh, that’s a megawattage project—I’m going to need a megaraise to complete that.” When you think a change will be easy, you could say, “No problem. That’s a milliwatt (a milliwatt is a thousandth of a watt). A firefly could generate that much power. I’ll have it done in a millisecond.”

As you help the customer choose a course of action and begin to formulate a plan, estimating the power required to make the proposed changes becomes imperative.

Estimate the power by breaking down the work into packages that can be individually estimated. Whenever possible, solicit estimates from experts in the particular area, or better yet, the people who would actually do the work. Then, sum the estimates of the individual work packages.

A unit of measure analogous to watts might be person-months per month. Of course, the ultimate measure of the cost of a change is the amount of dollars spent. But a simple dollar amount does not reflect whether the dollars are used in a year or a month. Even a measure that accounts for time, such as net present value, does not account for important indirect costs such as the opportunity cost of scarce resources. Early in the decision making, rough order-of-magnitude estimates will suffice. As the project gets closer to actuation—and contract—much more accurate estimates will be required.

Estimate power required as work over a period of time. Use previous projects or “bottom-up” estimates as guides. Refer to your Force Fan Out Map (discussed on page 79) to consider indirect costs.