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When everything is a priority, nothing is a priority

I remember when I read the book “Prioritizing the Product Backlog” by Roman Pichler. He wrote: “I’ll never forget the day when I suggested to the product manager of a new health-care product to prioritize the use case pile in front of her. She looked at me, her eyes widening, and replied, ‘I can’t. They are all high-priority’”.

Quoting to Karen Martin: “When everything is a priority, nothing is a priority”. I have faced this issue too. I tried to solve it by telling the manager that the team couldn’t be working on five tasks at the same time and asked her what she wanted to obtain first. She didn’t hesitate a second and pointed to one of the user stories. “No doubt,” she said, “this one, definitively”.

How does Agile help you to deliver?

Have you ever wondered why Agile is so widely adopted? How does it help companies to deliver sooner and better? Here are some tips:

  • Releasing frequently improves customer satisfaction and allows the client to decide how the product is evolving.
  • Sprints are small milestones. They help you to overcome the Parkinson laws and avoid feared deadlines at the end of the project, when little can be done if something went wrong.
  • The Kanban board, the backlog and the sprint backlog make visible the pending work and how we progress (have a look at the Checklist Effect by Atul Gawande).

Deadline Driven Development

I have recently read the article «Deadline Driven Development» from Simón Muñoz. Quite a captivating one.
As in TDD, we create tests before developing the solution, he suggests setting a deadline before estimating, and then doing only what can be done until that deadline.
There are multiple perks to that approach: product managers avoid scope creep, and adding unnecessary features to the product being built. Other than that, developers will reduce the overengineering or creating too complex solutions, far beyond what is needed.
We will be reducing waste by building applications or services with just the two or three most important uses cases . Then, we can release our service, and see what was useful, what our clients require now, when they can use the product. From that point we can make more informed decisions on investing more, and better (or to cancel the product).


See the link to the original blog post (in Spanish): Deadline Driven Development by Simón Muñoz.

Too small to fail

Kaizen, or continuous improvement, is a well-known term in business or industrial organization. It’s now spreading widely in every sector of the economy, but it also applies in social life or medicine. This philosophy arose in Japan. Their industry had  productivity and quality problems after the end of World War II. They looked for solutions, and brought experts such as  Deming. Yes, the same Deming of ITIL and the “plan-do-check-act” Deming cycle. His mission: training hundreds of professionals and engineers in quality and improvement systems. These methods had already been applied in the USA. But Japan developed them and improved them. They refined them to such an extent that years later they could return them to the Americans themselves as new work philosophies.
The principle behind Kaizen is to carry out small continuous improvements. The results of those changes are analysed and the fine-tuning resumes. In that way  the productivity or quality of the task being performed can be improved. Making small changes little by little is far more effective than trying to tackle everything in one go. This way you avoid the fear of big change—and the procrastination that normally goes with it —when faced with the idea of starting a transformation. These small adjustments, done continuously, end up becoming a habit and generating permanent results.
The idea is to make changes so easy that it would be hard to fail in their implementation. First we created the habit of changing. Then we add new changes or nudge the milestone of a change a bit further, so we can improve incrementally. It’s important to apply adjustments one by one. The idea is to avoid the complexity of choosing what to apply and when. That way we will be able to analyse the result of each of these minor improvements. If we apply several at the same time, we won’t know which one has worked and which hasn’t. Or whether the effect of one has cancelled out another.
In your project you can decide to deploy every SCRUM, TDD, unit testing, continuous integration, and so on and so forth all at once. But probably the only thing you’ll manage to do will be to drive your team crazy. Yes, all those practices are good for your project, but, are the most basic ones working? Do you have good version control? Are you delivering software every two weeks? It’s better to start by the simplest ones or the ones that you consider most effective to improve your situation. Then you will be able to add the others.
Even far away from the field of software, there are companies that use Kaizen and Lean techniques in production. Take, for example, SPB, manufacturers of household brands like Bosque Verde in Spain. Their industrial manager declares:
“SPB has improved its productivity by 15% without investing in new machinery or carrying out staff cuts. The systems we have applied have enabled our company to reduce our expense accounts from 15 to 25%. We have improved our raw-materials management by 45%. And we have reduced the stock period of our product to eleven days.”
SPB had foreseen that to improve, they would need great investments and opening new factories in northern Spain. But instead they have focused on improving their productivity plan.
We can apply such changes to improve our health or personal life too. If we have always wanted to write a book or a blog, we can set out to write 1,000 words a day. But most of us will probably abandon that idea in only a few days. However, if we set out to write just 50, the change will be so easy that it will be hard to fail. First, establish the habit of sitting and writing for 15 minutes a day. Then we can take the challenge further and make it bigger, little by little.
In my case, I have also applied similar techniques, but I’ve hardly noticed. When I published my book it hardly sold at all. For weeks and weeks it had just the few sales I considered F&F (Family & Friends). But I didn’t just park it there and forget about it. I changed it to a different Amazon category. Then I changed the cover. After that, I included some new chapters. Later, I improved the description until I found one that seemed optimal. Some of these changes made my sales increase up to 50% in a week. If I had just left it there, the book would never have reached decent positions in its categories. I would have concluded that the content wasn’t interesting. Or that it just could not sell well without a professional publishing house to support it.
You can find texts like this and many other about how to manage agile projects in my book Agile 101: Practical Project Management (available on Amazon).
Book on Scrum: Agile 101, Practical Project Management
Agile 101 – Practical Project Management

Translation by Begoña Martínez. You can also find her on her LinkedIn profile. Proofreading by David Nesbitt.

Five lessons learnt in project management

Every time I finish a project, I try to make a balance report for myself. I look at the things that went wrong and the things that went right. The things that I tried and worked, and those that I shouldn’t repeat. Even those times when that final balance came up negative, maybe the project was worth it if in the next one I don’t make the same missteps again.
I have combed those balances and extracted five of the most important lessons I have learned. Some are beginner’s pitfalls. Others I should have solved by simple logic but matters weren’t so obvious when I was in the middle of things. Here they are:
Agile works
It’s difficult to quantify, but ever since I started using Scrum in my projects, the number of hours spent per feature has gone down —and in my opinion quite considerably so. We were able to gain 80% of Scrum’s advantages with three things. First, the daily 15-minute follow-up meeting. Second, keeping the graph of the state of the project that tells us whether we’re doing well or not. And third, delivering software every the two weeks. Also, every fortnight, clients seemed to feel more comfortable when they received the items that we had agreed on two weeks before. In July and August it was not possible to meet. So every week we delivered a simple two-page document with the percentage of completion of each feature. This document included two paragraphs explaining why those percentages were that way. This helped us to regain credibility in a project that was quite difficult —especially in September when they could check that those percentages were real.
Not everything is positive in Scrum
Being a Scrum Master takes far more work than simply being a project manager. In those daily 15-minute follow-ups you will be told about lots of difficulties that the team needs to overcome before they can continue. Trying to find solutions will take the rest of your morning.
And having a deadline every 2 weeks can be exhausting. You cannot sprint for months. Six months later you start trotting (and that, with luck). You need to take this into account from the first planning meeting on.
Last, but not least, Scrum is not magic. Whatever method you use, you are going to need a team trained for the job at hand, ready to roll up their sleeves and work, and willing to contribute. Teams like this don’t grow on trees. If you have one, your job as a project manager is to get out of the way as much as possible.
Adding more workers to a project that’s behind schedule will only delay it further
This was sufficiently covered a long time ago in the book The Mythical Man-Month. Even so, it’s still necessary to highlight it, as there are hardly any exceptions to this rule. No matter how tight the deadlines are nine women cannot create a baby in one month.
Who owns all this?
No matter what we call it —designating the Product Owner, identifying the stakeholders, engaging them—the end we’re going to need to know who is going to validate the project in real life. And I do not mean who is going to green-light the invoice. You’ll also need to know who is going to use the product. The project will be a success only if, after delivering it, it works and it’s useful.
At some point during the project the area manager gave us all the documentation, validated the partial deliveries, tested the whole application, and congratulated us on our work. Regrettably, when his secretary came into the training session a week before deployment, she said: “that’s of no use to me: that’s no longer the right template, as I need to gather different information now.” This meant a week of extra hours and additional effort, on top of the risk of deploying a product that could be unstable.
Minimum Viable Product
If you already have something that could be helpful to the user, deliver it, deploy it, put it up for sale. Don’t wait until you have each and every one of the features finished. If you remember the Pareto principle, with just 20% of your planned features you’ll be able to cover 80% of the uses that your product will have.

 

When it’s in production, you’ll be able to get feedback from the users. They know with more precision what they need, and you’ll know where you’ve failed and how you can fix it. If you bet on just one final delivery, you only have one bullet to hit the bull’s eye. If we had done this, it would have saved us a lot of problems with the product of the previous example.

 

You can find texts like this and many other about how to manage agile projects in my book Agile 101: Practical Project Management (available on Amazon).
Book on Scrum: Agile 101, Practical Project Management
Agile 101 – Practical Project Management

Translation by Begoña Martínez. You can also find her on her LinkedIn profile. Proofreading by David Nesbitt.

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