3 ms·
If the team can't hammer things out in a timeboxed meeting, there are some options. With new technology, I'll have a pair of team members spend some time doing
by donw 10y ago
If the team can't hammer things out in a timeboxed meeting, there are some options.
With new technology, I'll have a pair of team members spend some time doing exploratory work. Spend some time with the top 2-3 technologies and see which is the best fit.
Taking notes through this process is important. If we're comparing databases, include benchmarks and tooling observations. For small organizations, this is usually a multi-day process. For large organizations, maybe up to a month. But at the end, the team can make a decision based on at least some experience and information.
If, on the other hand, we have competing factions that each has experience with a specific bit of kit, but can not come to an agreement: we roll for initiative.
Literally.
I have a set of dice in my backpack for this exact situation.
Often, the worst decision is no decision at all, and I would rather that the team go down the wrong road for a month (and learn from the process) then spend that month arguing over what color to paint the hangar de vélos.
- amorphid 10y agoI'm taking my dice to work from now on.
- dkersten 10y agoI have used Siri to flip coins and roll die in work. Often it's prompted people to make a call (rather than using what the dice/coin said), which is a great outcome.
- bluesnowmonkey 10y agoWhen it's something you can benchmark, sure that's a very straightforward decision. But I've found almost any important decision has a huge subjective component. We should use this database instead of that one because the community support is better, even though it is slower in a benchmark. How do you measure community support? We should design a system this way instead of that because it's more cohesive even though it's more lines of code. How do you measure design cohesion? I think if we had a difficult decision to make and someone wanted to roll dice, it would feel pretty frustrating, like giving up. A more motivating process would involve giving someone responsibility, empowering them to succeed, and just letting them make the call.
- Pica_soO 10y agoEh, decision matrix, with weigths according to votes on the decisive values of a product. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_matrix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_matrix Solves nearly all decisions.