Continuously delivering faster might be your biggest impediment
I don’t have enough fingers to count all the times I’ve heard “we want to deliver faster” as one of the prime reasons to incorporate business agility. Not saying this is a bad thing, BUT “delivering faster” asserts there is a baseline that apparently is not desirable and that there is a target of delivery rate/time we want to achieve.
Baselines and targets have been a lot less present in those same discussions. If we’re just going to deliver faster blindly, without thinking about what this means, we are potentially creating a self-destructing cycle. It’s the same M.O. of how typical grandmas work. Let me explain.
Grandma knows best
Patrick is a loving twentysomething-year-old guy. He lives an active lifestyle, but not per se superfit. And that’s okay, his main focus is on being happy. Patrick has great friends, a good relationship with his parents and brother, and a lovely grandma called Celia. Every Saturday morning at 11 sharp, Patrick visits Celia.
Now, Celia has this knack of treating Patrick like he’s is starving of hunger. So she makes sure that there is plenty of food in the house to feed her grandson.
“Would you like a piece of homemade apple pie with whipped cream?”
“I would love some, grandma!”
Patrick devours the apple pie. And indeed, it was delicious.
“That went quick, would you like some more?”
“Sure, one piece would still fit. Thanks!”
The second piece goes down the old food hatch pretty quickly, too.
“We’ve got cookies!”
Who says no to cookies? So a few cookies follow.
“Hey grandma, I think I’m good now.”
“Nonsense dear, you haven’t had the chocolate milk yet! You gotta eat enough!”
Reluctantly he chugs down the chocolate milk but takes his sweet time to finish it. He’s at his limit of what he can consume now.
“How’s work, Patrick?”
“Really good!” He says with relief, as it takes the focus off the food. “I’ve been enjoying work, the kindest and amazing people are working in my team and I just got a promotion. So, all in all, it’s coming along really nicely.”
“That’s wonderful! We gotta celebrate with a strawberry milkshake!!”
“Noooooooo…”
That last sip of cocoa popped back up. But I’m drifting off now.
Sometimes grandma needs to hold back
Accelerating delivery could definitely be a great thing. Speeding up time to market has the potential to capitalize on new market opportunities, or even create whole new markets on its own.
The danger lies in (mis-)alignment with stakeholders. If we, as a Scrum team, are delivering more features than our stakeholders (or in this case users specifically) can consume and digest, we’ll be turning into team Celia over here.
Users will be confused by the sheer amount of new features popping up, while they’re still trying to understand the previous increment.
Scaled grandmas will clog the system
The same principle as mentioned in the previous paragraph works with scaling environments. I’ve had the opportunity to work with a well-functioning team in a scaled environment. Their output was impacting and feeding at least 6 other teams.
My team was working together for a while already. They knew each other personally, got along well, was well balanced when it comes to skills and knowledge. The other teams, however, were not on the same level. In that regard, they were lagging a bit.
It’s easy to think about how great this team could perform (they still had a lot of improvement points, don’t get me wrong), but they were not balanced with their surroundings. While they were producing a lot of valuable output, they were flooding the system. The other 6 teams had difficulties continuously incorporate all the output delivered by that one other team.
The funny thing is that other teams were being perceived as being slow and not delivering the quality as expected by the organization. But when we (group of Scrum Masters) went into the root cause of this, we figured out that the lack of quality was not because of missing skills or motivation, it happened due to corner-cutting in order to stay in-cadence with my team. They just didn’t want to mention that out loud, afraid of being looked upon as incapable of delivering what they were expected to do.
Sometimes it’s better to keep the food in the cabinet
Again, I’m not saying delivering faster is a bad thing. It only becomes a bad thing when the rate of delivery outgrows the potential of consumption of the respected system (teams or stakeholders in this example). You could think of this as a highway metaphor too, with too many cars flooding the system (i.e. creating a massive traffic jam). I just liked Celia very much.
The moral of this story is to think about this when speeding up. What does faster delivery mean? And when is it sufficient? When is it better to keep our foot off the gas pedal for a second? I’d love to hear when you had to keep some features back in order to maintain balance!
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