Velocity and the Pathology of Forever

We do it to ourselves. We ask teams to think long term and produce plans that imagine a future a year or more out. This style of planning…

We do it to ourselves. We ask teams to think long term and produce plans that imagine a future a year or more out. This style of planning is hugely valuable in terms of ensuring that we’re pursuing meaningful outcomes that will make a difference.

The problem is that it sets an often false expectation that the team and its mission will stick around forever. When we think in terms of forever we do things very differently-we take our time, we get to all the corner cases, we don’t mind spending a few months finding ourselves and so on.

The customer suffers in the meantime. The project will be around for a while so why not get everything out of the way, why bother starting with the most critical bits? Worse, we know our estimates are inaccurate and that the goals change as our understanding changes so in practice this model leads to long iteration cycles on lower importance items with teams continually saying “we just have to finish X before we get to the good stuff.”

The counter-narrative is to assume the project or team might get cut in any given week-also a bad place to live because if we assume only a week or two at a time we won’t be willing to tackle important but complex outcomes.

The prescription to solve this isn’t anything new-it’s simply good Agile development where we’re shipping working, usable units of code as often as possible on a regular cadence. We may still find that it doesn’t make sense to cut a project in cycle three out of five, for example, but we could, and likely the team’s internal prioritization function will reflect this, bringing the work that provides the greatest leaps in terms of value to the forefront. Start with the good stuff!

Originally published at http://adamjudelson.com on June 15, 2016.