Earlier this week, we looked at the gaps between active steps: the time when an item is ‘in progress’ but nobody is working on it.
To make those gaps visible, follow one item through its journey.
Start small.
Choose a recently completed piece of work and reconstruct what happened from the moment it started to the moment it finished.
Continue reading The hidden life of agile work: follow one item through its waitingAn item can spend days ‘in progress’ while nobody is actively working on it.
Someone has started it. Everyone involved is busy. Yet the item is waiting for an answer, a review or its turn in somebody else’s queue.
If we want to understand why delivery takes so long, we need to notice the gaps between the work.
Continue reading The hidden life of agile work: most delays happen while nobody is working on the itemIn Tuesday’s post, I explored why agility needs boundaries: clarity about what we protect and what we can change.
Now consider what happens when those boundaries meet a difficult deadline.
There is more work left than the team can realistically finish. What changes next?
DSDM offers a deliberate approach: protect time, cost and the agreed quality standard, then vary the features delivered.
Try bringing that thinking into your next planning conversation.
Continue reading Agile delivery: what could wait so the important work can finish?Being agile means being willing to adapt. But what, exactly, are we willing to change?
Consider a team approaching a deadline with more work than it can finish. Should it extend the deadline, squeeze in extra hours, reduce testing or deliver fewer features?
That choice deserves a conversation before the pressure arrives.
DSDM, the Dynamic Systems Development Method, makes the trade-off explicit: fix time, fix cost and fix the agreed level of quality, then vary the scope.
Lower-priority requirements provide room to adapt. They can be deferred by agreement when the work proves harder than expected.
The aim is to deliver a useful solution within the agreed constraints. That requires clear priorities and enough flexibility in the feature list.
If everything is a must, there is nowhere for that flexibility to go.
Continue reading Agility needs boundariesOn Tuesday, we looked at a simple idea: a new Sprint does not erase the history of work already in progress.
So what can that history tell us?
Velocity shows how much estimated work a team completed in previous Sprints. Throughput counts the items completed over a period. Both tell us about finished work, but neither tells us how long a particular unfinished item has been in progress or has been waiting.
Continue reading What the age of unfinished work can tell us
