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I'm currently reading through Johanna Rothman's "Manage Your Project Portfolio" and related literature and a bunch of this resonates: * Finishing work is more
by mherdeg 5y ago
I'm currently reading through Johanna Rothman's "Manage Your Project Portfolio" and related literature and a bunch of this resonates:
* Finishing work is more important than starting it
* Teams working together on a single priority ("swarming") seem to be more successful than teams where each person is doing 1-2 things on their own
A few subtle points in this article that made me think:
* Keeping existing features working as well as customers expect is a great zeroth priority but it can be hard to know what customers actually expect. Absolutely the worst is when you carefully maintain a very reliable, feature-rich thing that no one particularly wants or uses. In an org without a dedicated PM, I'm never quite sure how to account for time spent on the product-management work of "listen to my customers about what they want from my service".
* The article talks about engineers and stakeholders caring about "project X" and "feature Y". A bunch of literature suggests that anyone who is thinking this way is probably a bit lost -- they have lost sight of the business outcome that the team's work is supposed to be getting (more sales, quantifiably happier customers, fewer pager alerts interrupting engineers, whatever). If you can tie particular features/projects to outcomes maybe you can make it easier to explain why you've prioritized other work first (it makes bigger outcomes sooner).
- nevir 5y agoIt's also worth noting that another way to reduce the cost to maintain your existing functionality (priority 0) is to actively _remove_ rarely-used or less valuable functionality
- yayajacky 5y agoYou can figure out if people use or care about your service or not via observability.
- blacklivsmatr 5y agoDisagree. If you followed observability no text editor would do more than Notepad
- bryanrasmussen 5y agomost text editors aren't services though?
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago> Teams working together on a single priority ("swarming") seem to be more successful than teams where each person is doing 1-2 things on their own It's an interesting one, same as e.g. pair programming; people (and I'm speaking for myself but I'm sure others will agree) prefer to work alone, because software engineering is difficult, brainy work, whereas swarming and pair programming are social activities. If you're like me - introverted, probably on the spectrum, etc - it's something that is well out of your comfort zone.
- domnantas 5y agoI think this is not referring to swarm-, or pair-programming. Think of it as the team focusing on a single feature/problem at a time. It just means the team going in the same direction.
- roeles 5y ago> Teams working together on a single priority ("swarming") seem to be more successful than teams where each person is doing 1-2 things on their own I wonder if there is a reference supporting that statement. I believe it, but it would be nice to have a reference.