This is me, 5 years old, on my birthday!
I had created a huge list of presents that I dreamed of…. Not based on any insight in costs or what my parents thought reasonable to give me. So probably not feasible at all…
Sometimes I get a similar feeling when I observe development teams…
The wish list
I once joined a team that worked on a huge product development wish list, created by the product manager. It contained product improvements and new features.
The list was about 100 items long and each item contained a very short description of required functionality. A kind of list of gadgets. Nothing more.
It did not show any priority, nor did it show any estimation in time and effort…
So whether it would take 10 hours or 1000 hours, that was not taken into account. And the order of things also did not seem to matter.
The result was that the engineers did cherry picking. They took those activities that they liked most. And then many times… the development stopped. Because there was nobody assigned to take over, because there was no plan, no planning whatsoever.
Not many product changes were delivered, there was no coherence in the team, nobody felt committed nor appreciated.
Time to take action!
I took over the complete project management. The senior engineer went back to doing what he was really good at: engineering!
After talking to team members individually, I sat down with the engineers in the team.
We went through the wish list and added rough estimation in hours needed, lead time, investment reuired, complexity and if the team had the capabilities.
Then I showed the wish list to the Product Manager. I asked him to prioritise 10 items of the list, based on effort-benefit. That was a tough discussion!
But…. after some meetings, after several cups of coffee, he realized I was not going to give up and he gave me his top 10.
A plan, followed up!
I planned a meeting with the complete team and we discussed the plans for the top 5 in more detail. We created a planning, discussed risks and potential issues, divided the workload and got started.
We planned weekly team meetings, created action list and I kept track of progress.
It took “blood, sweat and tears” to have some team members stick to the plan, to do their part, communicate any issues etc. but in the end the product features saw the daylight.
It created commitment and team spirit. Engineers started enjoying their work again.
Several months later we had cleaned up the wish list, prioritized the activities, executed a lot of developments and redesigned the product line successfully!
From chaos to a structured approach!
