If your delivery dates are more dream than reality, you have a problem. It means there is a disconnect, a huge one between what your team is focused on and what they are being asked for. If I’m in a meeting and I start to see this happen, a small voice starts going off in my head – “No, no, no, no, no” – and that’s the warning sign (simple as it may be) that…
Mad Scrambles happen when “something” big is happening. Not everyone has a good idea of what the “something” is, what it means or what the impact on the work is. In short, the team all has a different view of what it is to be done. As a result, the team starts going in various directions doing what they think is right to fix that something which ends in everyone going in different directions (i.e.,…
The blocked state is the one and only state that everyone looks at. Because they know it’s bad. They know something is wrong. They know something is broken. But they don’t know what, so they ask questions. They seek to learn more. They want to understand and talk about. Too bad we don’t talk about all states this way, but we’ll start with blocked.
If you’re looking for a way to slow down your team. Have them switch between delivery work and anything else. Have them come to meetings they don’t need to be at. Have them switch between different technology platforms for communications. Give them unclear guidance on what to do. Leave “things” up to them but don’t outline your expectations. It sounds like things we shouldn’t be doing, but we do them all the time, even though…
This is a hard question to ask. At the most simplistic level, we want to say – “I can code for 6 hours a day, every day for the next 2 weeks” – and hope that happens. For some, it might be possible, for many it isn’t. There are meetings, customer issues, planning sessions, product discussions, design chats, etc, etc – what your velocity is can change by the day, perhaps by the week. The…