Accelerating Agile with Paceline

It happens.  For whatever reason a release is blown.  Maybe it was an estimate too low, hardware failure interrupts productivity, team member sick it doesn’t matter.   The release is not going to happen in the manner as it was planned.

Hopefully you are using an agile process such as Paceline, Kanban/Lean, SCRUM and detected the release is not going to happen early.   Unfortunately if you are using a waterfall development process it is likely too late and you will begin to see turnover as your team also knows it isn’t going to happen and do not want to stick around for the death march.

So what is management to do?  You got your release manager or project manager showing the current projection of the release and there just isn’t enough days?   Well the worse thing management can do is announce the  death march.   Visions of Bill Lumbergh peering over your cube wall with coffee mug in hand telling you that you need to work on Saturday and Sunday too will likely bring out the unmotivated Peter Gibbons in all of us.   It actually is dentrimental to the organization.  Not only will it result in demoralizing the team and likely increase turnover, it will also teach the remaining team members to sandbag the estimates.

The best thing management can do is hopefully be capturing week by week, retrospectives on how to improve the process, eliminate roadblocks.  Maybe you should do a software development eco-system assessment as an unbiased way of discovering opportunities to make a more effecient environment.

So now your saying, “yeah, yeah, we did that and we still are not going to make the date!”  Fair.  Did you meet with the team to get their perspective on how to make the date?   Maybe eliminating or scaling down the solution to a tactical approach and do the strategic solution later?   Maybe adding another resource from an under utilized team can bring it in the date.   Did you look at your cumulative flow chart from you kanban tool and eliminate bottlenecks?   Maybe the team is unbalanced number of analysts, developers and quality engineers to have a good flow.

Lastly, did you go back to your customer and tell them to make the date you would have to cut scope?   Maybe the customer is willing to push the date out or cut scope to make a date.   If you are not communicating with the customer on a week by week basis this becomes a painful topic.    However even in fixed-bid projects I have negotiated the reduction in scope to make a critical date for the customer.

In short, the command and control days are over.  Simply saying we will make the date at all costs is part of dinosaur managerial thinking (or lack of thinking).   That is not managing, that is dictation.   Work together as a team with regular dialog with the customer and deliver business value frequently and you will be part of the success of the business instead of an impediment.

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