3 ms·
The magic trick is to have a singular queue, and/or a singular stakeholder representative. When you have disparate independent stakeholders who each have their
by steveBK123 3y ago
The magic trick is to have a singular queue, and/or a singular stakeholder representative.
When you have disparate independent stakeholders who each have their own value/urgency models, these things start to fall apart.
I've frequently worked in large orgs with far more internal stakeholders than devs, which meant that at any given time, only 50% of stakeholders were having any of their tasks actively worked on. You can play games to try and mask that, but end of the day it is reality.
So then the game they all play is making sure they are one of the stakeholders with active tasks at all times. Which then turns into competitive escalatory MAD. Which mostly turns into management by squeakiest wheel, because if you don't take care of badguyX, he is going to tell his bosses boss you are an idiot, so it's easier just to keep the queue of badguyX active then piss them off and then still have to do their work after all the fight. No manager wants to admit falling into this game, but they very very often do.
I'd also point out in these situations, the tie breaker / decision maker is far more senior of a person than someone who is going to go through some sort of quantitative process vs "using their judgement" (aka gut).
Not saying I have an answer, but am saying the post is solving a simpler version of the actual problem.
- warner25 3y agoI'm so glad that I just stumbled across this comment. I'm a career military officer who has served on big, upper-echelon staffs that were stunningly disorganized and dysfunctional. You nailed it with this description of how things really work. I always said that people were busy - there was a frenzy activity - but nothing ever got done until someone very senior (i.e the commanding general or one of his deputy commanders) stepped in, like you said, and made a decision from his gut that a particular thing needed to get done, and then everybody would actively work on that one thing and nobody's work would be blocked. Eventually I realized that the game for stakeholders was all about getting their things into a decision briefing for the commander to make that happen.
- em-bee 3y agothe solution is obviously to always work on multiple tasks simultaneously. how often you need to switch depends on the granularity of the report. if your report is daily you touch each task once a day. if it is hourly, you switch through all tasks every hour. the pomodoro method has you taking a break every 30 minutes, so two tasks each hour are possible without cutting time on each task to short. i am not entirely serious. but as an independent contractor with multiple customers, working on tasks for different clients every day or every week is not unrealistic.
- steveBK123 3y agoright, and then you get into effort vs duration game. so every task now takes 2 weeks duration because it will get approx 2 days of effort in that window. then the next side effect is any remotely challenging task gets avoided because the duration of a 1 week task becomes 5 weeks and.... forget it.
- em-bee 3y agovery true. but when you are in the situation with more projects than developers, each project will have to wait either way. can't get around that. it either takes 2 weeks because the developer works on multiple projects at the same time, or it takes 2 weeks because the project spends most of the time waiting in the queue. the end result is the same. so it really doesn't matter. the benefit if the queue system is that you get to focus on one project at a time. the benefit of the paralell system is that you don't waste waiting times that may occur when during the development you need something from someone else and have to wait for their response. which is better depends on the specific project and how the stakeholders communicate.