The more businesses and development organisations I work with, the more I see common problem “themes”. In this series of articles I am trying to highlight the problems and show the potential solutions to some of these common symptoms.

“The team can’t deliver anything!”

“They are always late!”

I usually hear this as a general perception from those outside of the development team or those not involved in the day to day delivery of software.

Perception is reality- so there is a problem. What can we do.

Clarify goals and vision

If the development team can list *loads* of stuff they have done, then it may be that the delivery focus is off – so stuff is going out the door, but it’s not what the business need. Ensure the development goals for the deliveries are clear, valuable, understood and agreed by everyone not just the team. Whilst the development team may care that we are “re-factoring to remove the anti-pattern generic repositories to remove the leaky abstraction” (or whatever) – you know that means nothing to the guy selling it! Make sure the goals and vision mean something.

Advertise

It may be that stuff is actually getting out the door, but no one knows. Obviously you need to make sure people know the team have solved this problem or added that feature. This becomes exponentially easier once you have clarified your goals and vision, ensuring they are aligned with business value and understood by all. In fact ultimately if you can aim to measure progress using delivery of goals and value then advertisement is built in!

Do less to do more

When the team are actually really struggling to ship stuff that needs a bit more investigation. One of the reasons I find often is that teams and even organisations trying to do too many things concurrently. If the team can list 50 projects that they are working on, chances are they aren’t going to deliver any of them to time as they are spending most of their time multiplexing. Kanban tells us to limit the amount of work in play to maximise the output. This works in small scale for the team’s day to day work or in larger scale for the organisational release planning. For me this is all about focus, start with one thing - the most important – complete it, then move onto the next. Only attempt to do more stuff in parallel when you have learned how to deliver successfully – even then be mindful not to fall back into the trap of trying to do too much…