I just got back from a day at Universal Studios in Orlando.
One of the highlights was visiting the Wizarding world of Harry Potter section.
We toured Hogwarts, drank butter beer and browsed through Olivanders wand shop.
I even bought a magic wand.
It just doesn’t work on my projects.
I'm sure you've heard about the triple constraints of project management. It basically holds that adjusting any of the 3 sides of the triangle has a direct effect on the other 2 sides. Unfortunately moving to an agile delivery method does not give you a free pass to avoid those constraints.
Sorry.
Sorry.
An all too common scenario I've seen is when Sales or Product Management have promised a fixed set of functionality to the delivered within a set time frame, and it's up to the Development team to deliver.
I've seen Product Requirement Documents that have had hundreds of really large requirements all listed with a priority of "Must Have". The cavalry of reinforcements never arrives, leaving the team in a no-win situation:
I've seen Product Requirement Documents that have had hundreds of really large requirements all listed with a priority of "Must Have". The cavalry of reinforcements never arrives, leaving the team in a no-win situation:
- If you're at a Public company, this leaves you with some revenue recognition issues if you booked sales based on features not supplied
- There's a hit to the company reputation for missing delivery dates
- That sort of pressure on a team does not make a pleasant work environment. You're going to see staff turnover if you set them up to fail like this.
- There's still no commission for the Sales guy.
- Someone decides to ship anyway - with incomplete features or buggy code because you ate into your QA time. That leads to a raft of other problems.
So how do you solve it?
The easiest side of the triangle to build in some flexibility with is the scope. The other two sides generally require acts of congress to move from my experience.
When you have so many things to deliver, and you are delivering them with waterfall techniques, it's quite easy to fall into the trap of spreading yourself too thin across multiple requirements concurrently - and successfully completing none.
When you have so many things to deliver, and you are delivering them with waterfall techniques, it's quite easy to fall into the trap of spreading yourself too thin across multiple requirements concurrently - and successfully completing none.
So take the wish list - and stack rank it.
If you could have just 1 feature. What would it be?
What next?
If your business can't answer those questions - your problem isn't a Project Management or Delivery one.
