How To Estimate Properly: What to Steal from Agile
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And you also don't mention that if a manager wants to know when something is done more frequently than once a week, there's probably something else wrong there. Nobody should really be managing developers hour by hour, you're just going to kill productivity. Are you building a product in the long term, or are you micromanaging every paragraph of text on the web site, etc.
Planning poker has worked for me at companies that didn't otherwise adopt any agile processes. It's better if you use points in a more comprehensive way as mentioned in the article but a lot of umm... "people" just don't seem to get that abstract nature of it. Well, that may not be fair, but they definitely don't care. I have found it works just as well if you just call points "hours" because the most important part is having a bunch of people in a room talking about how difficult a task is going to be relative to the other tasks in a project. Estimation is one of the hard things to do, and if you can demonstrate a process that helps with that, people are more likely to try some of those other "crazy" ideas you keep ranting about...