A great idea or a distraction?

Most projects are delayed, especially tech projects. There are tons of reasons for this ranging from assuming too much, expecting a straight line to completion, believing you know the answer, lazy architects, politics, and despite your best efforts, what is essentially one of the biggest gambles of the whole project… who is the team delivering this? (Here’s a hint, get less people, but find the best people and pay them ridiculously well and give them flexibility and autonomy. You’ll save a ton of money)

But one of the biggest reasons for delay is great ideas, or another label for it… distractions. Some call it scope creep, but that’s not what I’m describing here. I’m talking about the culture of shiny things, and thinking we can do whatever we want in a tech project. It’s when some exec starts talking about using Alexa in the next release, before the app has barely delivered a visual interface let alone a voice one. It’s the, ‘can we just slip this one in, it’ll be so cool’ in the middle of a sprint.

By the way, I’m not saying it’s not a great idea. It could be a superb idea, at the right time, but right now it’s a distraction. Projects fail because they ship too late, too chaotic, don’t ship at all. They leave a wake of burnt money, souls and reputations.

There’s a way around this. Ship early, ship simply, ship often. In the projects I run, we start with a small window, a simple window, but we release. I don’t allow going live later, we should go live on time with less. “But what about flexibility and being agile?”. Agile is an abused term. People use it as a way to justify winging it and being chaotic. People also use it thinking it allows less structure, when in fact, it requires far more structure. Agile is a controlled structure to handling change, because change is inevitable. A solid scrum master will tell you, you don’t get to speak to the team during a sprint… they are there delivering what we all agreed to. The scope is locked. But guess what? There’s another sprint around the corner.

So, pick your time horizon, a really small one, a few days or weeks. Do your scope thrashing at the start, get everyone on board on what we’ll be shipping at the end of this week. No more than that. If things change you can absolutely have your great new idea, but next week, not this week. The World Cup final starts when it’s time for the World Cup final to start, not when the teams are ready.

Start simply, start small, but release early, release often.