The Five Thieves of Delivery
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Fragmented rhythms: When teams have different cadences for critical functions such as intake, prioritisation, development, and release, the system tends to become very noisy. Teams are forced to invest inordinate amounts of time in alignment with other teams and stakeholders to find and secure resources when timelines and approach mismatch. Teams can and should have autonomy playing their own rhythms but there’s no music worth listening to if they don’t all come back on the eighth beat.
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Not managing dependencies: Single biggest killer of roadmaps are dependencies. Worse than unpredicted dependencies are the ones that were known but either not communicated or communicated but forgotten. Teams are then forced to drop what they are doing and clean up the emergency.
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Sloppy intake: Either attempting to intake and prioritize programs centrally or through teams. The best intake systems are generally a blend that aligns the size and complexity of programs with the corresponding organisational level: big complex programs need central oversight to help with coordination, small fixes are best handled on the ground by the relevant team.
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Inconsistent naming: Positions, teams, systems, techniques, etc. Whatever your language is, it needs to be consistent. This becomes increasingly important when teams begin to scale and finding the right people to work with becomes more challenging.
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Pivoting too often too late: The best way to steal your people’s will to live is to let them invest their hearts and souls into their work and then not releasing it. Although it is important to pivot where and when you need to, it is critical to consider the full cost of pivoting when the next shiny things presents itself. In a world of unlimited possibilities, the things you don’t do are often more important than the things that you do.