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How deadline-driven behavior sends your Scrum Teams spinning out of control
And 17 things to try instead. #11: Improve your team’s learning velocity.
If you want to hear the deafening sound of utter silence, say these words to a software delivery manager:
“To increase the odds of hitting your goals, don’t push your teams to deliver by a deadline.”
Having the slightest disdain for deadlines and plans is the ultimate form of bad manners in a corporate world. The corporate engine happily hums along by trying to deliver ideas by promised dates. Employees get hired and promoted based on their prowess at this game.
And yet, driving a set scope to a fixed date within a certain budget is the worst way to build a product. These days, we call this an output focus. We used to call it the iron triangle of project management. Regardless of the name, it does not play well with complex, uncertain product work.
I coach on Agile ways of building software products — mainly using a framework called Scrum. This is all a fancy way of saying I build the culture you need to create better software products. And moving folks from an output to an outcome focus is my most consistent, thorny challenge.
