5 ms·

> Once a quarter, we had a 3-day event in which the entire next 3 months were planned out, This is the part I don't understand. What sort of business are you i

by kqr 4y ago

> Once a quarter, we had a 3-day event in which the entire next 3 months were planned out, This is the part I don't understand. What sort of business are you in where you can actually meaningfully predict which will be the most valuable opportunities and ideas that will come your way in the next three months?

ThalesX 4y ago
Three months!? Is this the stability we expect from companies in our day and age? I would think it's a lost company, one that couldn't somewhat predict what the next three months are going to look like.
- pflenker 4y ago
  Just look back 3 month and assess how many of the things that happened were predictable (keeping in mind the fact that hindsight is 20/20). I wager every company in the world was affected by the world wide changes right now. Those who cling to plans are at disadvantage against those who have the ability to quickly adapt to the change.
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    > Those who cling to plans are at disadvantage against those who have the ability to quickly adapt to the change. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop
    - doctor_eval 4y ago
      > The OODA loop has become an important concept in litigation,[2] business,[3] law enforcement,[4] and military strategy. According to Boyd, decision-making occurs in a recurring cycle of observe–orient–decide–act. An entity (whether an individual or an organization) that can process this cycle quickly, observing and reacting to unfolding events more rapidly than an opponent, can thereby "get inside" the opponent's decision cycle and gain the advantage.
  - kgwgk 4y ago
    "In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable."
  - hef19898 4y ago
    Just throwing things to the wall and see what sticks is not agility, nor is it just mindlessly running after any random car like a dog chasing the mail man.
    - tikhonj 4y ago
      Who said anything about "mindless"? Just because work wasn't planned in detail in advance does not make it mindless—the people actually doing the work make creative, nuanced decisions as they're working. Not pushing a top-down, up-front plan gives people more room for careful nuanced thought. That isn't "throwing things to the wall" or "mindlessly running around", that's trusting a team of professionals to make effective creative decisions.
      - hef19898 4y ago
        I agree, if you have team of experienced professionals tgat is. If not, well, stuff to the wall it is. If wrapped in sometjing something agile, at least it looks good.
      - ThalesX 4y ago
        Who said anything about detailed planning? You’re throwing this in and then using it as a lever to push an engineering led approach. There is no such argument in this thread. There is however the argument of whether companies should look ahead for more than three months. And brilliant and trustable professionals don’t change my assessment that they should.
    - roguecoder 4y ago
      Trying to guess the future of complex systems is an exercise in hubris. Success is far more likely if you decide on a goal, and then build feedback loops that let you learn. And in the internet age a feedback loop of a month is painfully slow, never mind three.
      - hef19898 4y ago
        Not everything is a consumer facing app, you know?
  - ThalesX 4y ago
    > Just look back 3 month and assess how many of the things that happened were predictable (keeping in mind the fact that hindsight is 20/20). The company I work for hasn’t changed a single procedure or milestone. Neither have my clients. I am also not talking about predicting the world, but of predicting an internal kitchen. This is just n = 1 but I’ve never seen a company that does it’s strategic planning in detached 2 week sprints. If anything, if any sort of coherence exists I’d say that the previous sprint, the current sprint and the next sprint should have an understandable connection, and then we are already talking about a month and a half. > I wager every company in the world was affected by the world wide changes right now. Affected? Perhaps. Derailed? Not so much. > Those who cling to plans are at disadvantage against those who have the ability to quickly adapt to the change. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, but I’d trust and would like to work, more, for a company that doesn’t flap in the wind. No one in the industry expects stability like in the waterfall days, but to expect a company to change / adapt their strategy in less than a financial quarter is just marketingspeak in my opinion.
- sanderjd 4y ago
  "Somewhat predict" is incredibly different than "make a detailed plan for". I like strategic planning in 3, 6, even 12 month increments, but doing the detailed work toward those high level plans in much shorter and less static increments.
  - ThalesX 4y ago
    Let’s assume you have a strategy for the next 3 months. You identified / endivisioned a need in the market and came up with a reasonable solution; you locked in the budget, you allocated the resources. How many times are you going to change these in the 3 months?
    - sanderjd 4y ago
      But that's not the kind of plan that comes out of these planning sessions. What you're describing is more like the effort to put together organization / unit level OKRs. That is a good thing. But getting everyone together to guess ahead of time how they'll execute that solution in detail is a poor use of time in my opinion. I think the planning exercise is useful for cross organization alignment at a high level, but for individual contributors, I think it at best makes their eyes glaze over and at worst makes them frustrated and demoralized, and then once the planning is done everyone goes back to doing the actual work, which of course doesn't match the plan very closely.
mvdwoord 4y ago
I would honestly like to reverse this question... What sort of business can't look three months ahead?! Seriously, updating business logic rules to catch a trend or adjust for changing external conditions, I understand. But for software development?!
- kqr 4y ago
  Sure! I often start to make things which seem like a good idea at the time but after 1--8 weeks of A/B testing (or other verification methods) it turns out the market was not what I thought and it would be a waste of time to pour more work into it. At that point I can either "stick to the 3 month plan" and do something which I know has at best no value, or... try something else.
- marcinzm 4y ago
  Your team is working on a dozen features for the next three months. After looking through the code to start implementing one feature (4 weeks into the 3 months) the team realizes there is need to change another team's API. The other team already has all their time booked with feature. Cue a cascading set of slightly changing priorities. Now multiply that by every team in the company hitting something like this.
  - roguecoder 4y ago
    Collective code ownership is a prerequisite to most Agile processes for this very reason.
    - marcinzm 4y ago
      In my experience most companies specialize teams to various extents which makes true collective ownership difficult. An iOS team is likely going to have difficulty dealing with the ML code. This becomes even worse if the change is complex or touches the domain specific patterns.
      - drran 4y ago
Yizahi 4y ago
For example the sort of business which supplies hardware needed to write yours or mine comment. Not everyone is deploying to production every day or even every two weeks. Not everyone has feature development measured in hours.
tonyarkles 4y ago
> What sort of business are you in where you can actually meaningfully predict which will be the most valuable opportunities and ideas that will come your way in the next three months? I've got one foot in the pure software world and one foot in electronics hardware. I've worked with a number of startups, and some larger organizations and government. The SaaS startup world is the exception here, not the rule. Virtually any business that is not "we're ready to pivot on a dime" SaaS should be able to plan 3 months out. Generally speaking, any kind of strategic initiative is probably going to take longer than that to roll out. If there's any kind of manufacturing involved then design, V&V, manufacturing, and QA are likely going to be running on at least 3 month cycles. Sometimes things do pop up and it makes strategic sense to do a mid-quarter tactical shift to attack an extremely valuable lead, but that should be exceptional. Even in the SaaS world, people tend to jump on new "valuable opportunities" without really sitting back and assessing the cost of delaying everything else. This kind of organizational ADHD (one board member at a company called it "chasing butterflies") tends to result in a bunch of half-finished projects/products that all could have been valuable in their own right if they'd been run to completion instead of abandoned in favour of the next "golden opportunity".
cortesoft 4y ago
If you have a company that has more than 200 developers, there is a certain level of inertia involved in everything you do. You can’t be shifting projects nearly as quickly as when you have 10-50 developers. Having worked at both very large and very small companies, people who have not worked in the other just don’t understand what it is like at the other scale.

by kqr 4y ago

ThalesX 4y ago

Three months!? Is this the stability we expect from companies in our day and age? I would think it's a lost company, one that couldn't somewhat predict what the next three months are going to look like.

pflenker 4y ago
Just look back 3 month and assess how many of the things that happened were predictable (keeping in mind the fact that hindsight is 20/20). I wager every company in the world was affected by the world wide changes right now. Those who cling to plans are at disadvantage against those who have the ability to quickly adapt to the change.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  > Those who cling to plans are at disadvantage against those who have the ability to quickly adapt to the change. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop
  - doctor_eval 4y ago
    > The OODA loop has become an important concept in litigation,[2] business,[3] law enforcement,[4] and military strategy. According to Boyd, decision-making occurs in a recurring cycle of observe–orient–decide–act. An entity (whether an individual or an organization) that can process this cycle quickly, observing and reacting to unfolding events more rapidly than an opponent, can thereby "get inside" the opponent's decision cycle and gain the advantage.
- kgwgk 4y ago
  "In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable."
- hef19898 4y ago
  Just throwing things to the wall and see what sticks is not agility, nor is it just mindlessly running after any random car like a dog chasing the mail man.
  - tikhonj 4y ago
    Who said anything about "mindless"? Just because work wasn't planned in detail in advance does not make it mindless—the people actually doing the work make creative, nuanced decisions as they're working. Not pushing a top-down, up-front plan gives people more room for careful nuanced thought. That isn't "throwing things to the wall" or "mindlessly running around", that's trusting a team of professionals to make effective creative decisions.
    - hef19898 4y ago
      I agree, if you have team of experienced professionals tgat is. If not, well, stuff to the wall it is. If wrapped in sometjing something agile, at least it looks good.
    - ThalesX 4y ago
      Who said anything about detailed planning? You’re throwing this in and then using it as a lever to push an engineering led approach. There is no such argument in this thread. There is however the argument of whether companies should look ahead for more than three months. And brilliant and trustable professionals don’t change my assessment that they should.
  - roguecoder 4y ago
    Trying to guess the future of complex systems is an exercise in hubris. Success is far more likely if you decide on a goal, and then build feedback loops that let you learn. And in the internet age a feedback loop of a month is painfully slow, never mind three.
    - hef19898 4y ago
      Not everything is a consumer facing app, you know?
- ThalesX 4y ago
  > Just look back 3 month and assess how many of the things that happened were predictable (keeping in mind the fact that hindsight is 20/20). The company I work for hasn’t changed a single procedure or milestone. Neither have my clients. I am also not talking about predicting the world, but of predicting an internal kitchen. This is just n = 1 but I’ve never seen a company that does it’s strategic planning in detached 2 week sprints. If anything, if any sort of coherence exists I’d say that the previous sprint, the current sprint and the next sprint should have an understandable connection, and then we are already talking about a month and a half. > I wager every company in the world was affected by the world wide changes right now. Affected? Perhaps. Derailed? Not so much. > Those who cling to plans are at disadvantage against those who have the ability to quickly adapt to the change. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, but I’d trust and would like to work, more, for a company that doesn’t flap in the wind. No one in the industry expects stability like in the waterfall days, but to expect a company to change / adapt their strategy in less than a financial quarter is just marketingspeak in my opinion.
sanderjd 4y ago
"Somewhat predict" is incredibly different than "make a detailed plan for". I like strategic planning in 3, 6, even 12 month increments, but doing the detailed work toward those high level plans in much shorter and less static increments.
- ThalesX 4y ago
  Let’s assume you have a strategy for the next 3 months. You identified / endivisioned a need in the market and came up with a reasonable solution; you locked in the budget, you allocated the resources. How many times are you going to change these in the 3 months?
  - sanderjd 4y ago
    But that's not the kind of plan that comes out of these planning sessions. What you're describing is more like the effort to put together organization / unit level OKRs. That is a good thing. But getting everyone together to guess ahead of time how they'll execute that solution in detail is a poor use of time in my opinion. I think the planning exercise is useful for cross organization alignment at a high level, but for individual contributors, I think it at best makes their eyes glaze over and at worst makes them frustrated and demoralized, and then once the planning is done everyone goes back to doing the actual work, which of course doesn't match the plan very closely.

mvdwoord 4y ago

I would honestly like to reverse this question... What sort of business can't look three months ahead?! Seriously, updating business logic rules to catch a trend or adjust for changing external conditions, I understand. But for software development?!

kqr 4y ago
Sure! I often start to make things which seem like a good idea at the time but after 1--8 weeks of A/B testing (or other verification methods) it turns out the market was not what I thought and it would be a waste of time to pour more work into it. At that point I can either "stick to the 3 month plan" and do something which I know has at best no value, or... try something else.
marcinzm 4y ago
Your team is working on a dozen features for the next three months. After looking through the code to start implementing one feature (4 weeks into the 3 months) the team realizes there is need to change another team's API. The other team already has all their time booked with feature. Cue a cascading set of slightly changing priorities. Now multiply that by every team in the company hitting something like this.
- roguecoder 4y ago
  Collective code ownership is a prerequisite to most Agile processes for this very reason.
  - marcinzm 4y ago
    In my experience most companies specialize teams to various extents which makes true collective ownership difficult. An iOS team is likely going to have difficulty dealing with the ML code. This becomes even worse if the change is complex or touches the domain specific patterns.
    - drran 4y ago

Yizahi 4y ago

For example the sort of business which supplies hardware needed to write yours or mine comment. Not everyone is deploying to production every day or even every two weeks. Not everyone has feature development measured in hours.

tonyarkles 4y ago

> What sort of business are you in where you can actually meaningfully predict which will be the most valuable opportunities and ideas that will come your way in the next three months? I've got one foot in the pure software world and one foot in electronics hardware. I've worked with a number of startups, and some larger organizations and government. The SaaS startup world is the exception here, not the rule. Virtually any business that is not "we're ready to pivot on a dime" SaaS should be able to plan 3 months out. Generally speaking, any kind of strategic initiative is probably going to take longer than that to roll out. If there's any kind of manufacturing involved then design, V&V, manufacturing, and QA are likely going to be running on at least 3 month cycles. Sometimes things do pop up and it makes strategic sense to do a mid-quarter tactical shift to attack an extremely valuable lead, but that should be exceptional. Even in the SaaS world, people tend to jump on new "valuable opportunities" without really sitting back and assessing the cost of delaying everything else. This kind of organizational ADHD (one board member at a company called it "chasing butterflies") tends to result in a bunch of half-finished projects/products that all could have been valuable in their own right if they'd been run to completion instead of abandoned in favour of the next "golden opportunity".

cortesoft 4y ago

If you have a company that has more than 200 developers, there is a certain level of inertia involved in everything you do. You can’t be shifting projects nearly as quickly as when you have 10-50 developers. Having worked at both very large and very small companies, people who have not worked in the other just don’t understand what it is like at the other scale.