Does any of this sound familiar to you?
- Team is working on items established by stakeholder(s) with incomplete and/or always changing details
- Team struggles to get to consistency in the established define, design, deploy work management flow and ceremonies
- In order to get ahead, or even just to catch up, work managers get members of the team together to have sessions that accelerate the define and design steps of the workflow
- Return to Step #1
The biggest thing with situations like this is the third step; the belief that in order to ‘get ahead or catch up’, existing team members take time out of their schedule that is already dedicated to designing and developing already planned and committed work to do the same activities for unplanned and uncommitted work. The only way this is possible is if these team members are making up work time lost with their own time. The math will never add up.
Instead of trying to manufacture productivity through this downward spiral, it is important for teams to recognize a few things.
Defining should be on its own track
There should always be team members that are [partly] dedicated to the definition of the work with stakeholders. The key is that none of this time is considered in the capacity planning of designing and developing. Focusing this portion of the team’s energy on building high-quality definition and high-level design will along the rest of the team through their normal cadence to deliver results efficiently.
Build to milestones, not completion
Teams typically don’t go into work with the notion that what they are building is temporary. Therefore, the reality is that time is actually the most abundant resource a team has versus the least abundant as shown by how teams operate. Prioritization is a critical tool that stakeholders hold that ensures teams are providing optimal business value over snapshots of time.
Realize what the team hears by not making these changes
If situations like the above continue to plague a team, it is the organization telling them that they are actually not important to the overall success of the organization; just whatever they deliver is. Their way of working, time, balance, and overall experience working for the organization and on projects is not a concern in any real, significant way.
Teams can’t produce time. When projects aren’t going well, or at least not operating to expectation, altering the work flow with pre-activities to prepare of the actual activities isn’t accelerating the production of the work. They are masking the underlying issues of the team’s ability to manage expectations.