Comment by bitwize

Sorry.

My wife, despite loving all things French, just doesn't "do metric". She wants my height in feet and inches, my weight in pounds, boom done. So while I know my mass in kilograms, she needs the conversion done before she can even begin to have a reference point.

Upper management is the same way. They have forecasts that they need to make, deadlines and budget goals that they need to hit. They only deal in the units of hours and dollars (or local currency). Every software engineer is accountable for their work in those units only. The conversion needs to be done before the management chain has a reference point.

One easy way to do this is to have each engineer estimate the time it takes to fulfill a story after it's been pointed; then, upon completion, record their actual hours spent. Their estimated vs. actuals tend to stabilize over time, so even if they misestimate a task, you can arrive at a good guess at the time it will actually take.