Ask Slashdot: How Do You Deal With Priorities Inflation In IT Projects? 304
NetDanzr writes "I work for an IT company that has a steady stream of projects, new features to our existing products and technical support issues. As it is customary, though, our development resources are not sufficient to cover the amount of projects. As a result, our delivery dates are slipping, and as a result the average priority of projects is rising. Where the goal was to have only 10% of projects rated high, within a year nearly 50% of projects are rated as such. Our solution is to completely wipe out the project list once per year and start a new, properly prioritized list. How does your company deal with this inflation of priorities?"
We dont deal with it (Score:4, Funny)
we just all stress out and have 10000 tonnes of pressure 24/7/365
Re:We dont deal with it (Score:5, Funny)
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We're co-workers? Wow!
It's a small internet after all.
Re:We dont deal with it (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, I'm not familiar with the terminology in TFA, but I suspect it's the same situation where we're up against the wall with multiple systems down and a Sales laptop infected with a Croatian automailer and the VP comes and says:
"Stop. Just stop. I know you think you know where your priorities lie, but you're having difficulty seeing the big picture and you have a bad attitude from your inability to prioritize. So all of you come over here - I can't get this funny cat video to play on my iPad and it's crucial for this Sales presentation."
If you still have an American IT job in 2012.... (Score:3, Funny)
...then the policy is "The beatings will continue until productivity improves!"
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Re:We dont deal with it (Score:5, Insightful)
we just all stress out and have 10000 tonnes of pressure 24/7/365
Typically, this is the norm. Eventually, key people get better jobs, and it all comes tumbling down. Then they outsource it all. Then it gets expensive, and does not fit well. Then they hire a new team. Lather, rinse, repeat...
or... Cage Match! Re:We dont deal with it (Score:5, Insightful)
So: Invite your stakeholders to a Priority Planning Meeting (this is the 'cage match') and tell them:
1) Here is the list of invited stakeholders (name names).
2) If your priorities aren't important enough to come to the meeting, they'll be rated unimportant.
3) Come prepared to convince your peers why your projects are more important than theirs.
4) Your choices will set the project priorities for the next month (or week, or quarter.. some multiple of your iterations).
5) List the projects that are "on the table", along with their respective stakeholder(s) and your team's "cost" estimates.
*shrug* Then let them hash it out.
Agile fans would call this a kind of planning game; you'll probably make more progress telling your stakeholders it is a Priority Planning Meeting.
The smart ones will line up political support and make deals before the meeting.
Pro-tip: if you don't know who your stakeholders are, you have bigger problems than you are aware of. Seek professional help and with a qualified consultant to help you find out who they are.
Other random bits of advice:
A) Don't try to make everybody happy.
Even if it were possible (which it isn't), that simply isn't your job.
Your job is to allocate scarce dev resources to best serve company goals.
B) Verify with your boss that your job is to Allocate scarce dev resources to best serve company goals before holding the meeting, and let your boss know what you're planning so they don't get blind sided by it (that makes bosses unhappy).
C) There is a very real chance that everyone will be unhappy. Throw the unhappy people a bone and ask them to give you additional funding options: "Ok, so if your project is so important, what budget will cover it?" Then you have more options about how to get things done.
D) Work out (in advance) how to choose the winning projects: you could hope for consensus (100% unanimous agreement) but... a more practical method might be to give everybody one vote, or N-votes based on their %ge of their operating budget. Also work out how to handle tie-breaking; perhaps recruiting an arguably neutral third party, like the "Product Visionary" or someone, so you stay out of that hot-seat.
Re:We dont deal with it (Score:4, Insightful)
Deal with them like my debt. If I paid all of my debt collections the "minimum", I wouldn't have any food to eat. I just figure out what I can pay and pay top X amount of debt collectors who yell the loudest.
By not having the situation in the first place (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, it's that simple. Practice agile development and keep a prioritized backlog of work and this never happens. "50% of projects are rated [high]" basically means you have no prioritization.
This is the whole point of kanban (Score:4, Insightful)
Minimise work in progress. The key is to put a limit on the things which will be actively worked on. This puts an economic value on your team's time within the company. If you don't do this, you are effectively free and why wouldn't they then just chuck more and more junk at you?
It's then up to management to actually do their jobs and decide what is important and what is wishful thinking.
Note, it's probably not your job to decide the business priorities.
Re:By not having the situation in the first place (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree that'd basically fix it, but "agile" itself isn't necessary.
Just move to a stack instead of (or in addition to) priority numbers. IMO, priority numbers are nearly worthless. Put someone in charge of the stack order, and you're done.
This will open up one new problem... you'll have to have the discussion/argument about how you operate on a stack about once every 3 months, and defend that position absolutely. You may allow priorities to be tagged on stuff for PM/reporting purposes, but make them absolutely aware that development completely ignores priority (and, if possible, remove it from display to developers).
It's a pretty simple argument: You can not have two projects that are both the top most must be done now items. One MUST be more important than the other. They (management) can yell and fuss and scream all they want but, until they commit to changing the stack order, it's just hot air and can be completely ignored.
"This other thing MUST be a TOP TOP TOP priority NOW!" - ok sir, then just drag it up to the top and make it so.
"But this other thing must ALSO be TOP TOP priority!!!" - sir, do you hear what you just said? Here, just make these a simple list in the order you want them done.
If people are doing double duty as production support and development, which will always happen to some degree, make sure to place one above the other (preferably production support - if current system isn't running and supporting your custom base, new features don't matter).
Re:By not having the situation in the first place (Score:4, Insightful)
They (management) can yell and fuss and scream all they want but, until they commit to changing the stack order, it's just hot air and can be completely ignored.
"This other thing MUST be a TOP TOP TOP priority NOW!" - ok sir, then just drag it up to the top and make it so.
"But this other thing must ALSO be TOP TOP priority!!!" - sir, do you hear what you just said? Here, just make these a simple list in the order you want them done.
If people are doing double duty as production support and development, which will always happen to some degree, make sure to place one above the other (preferably production support - if current system isn't running and supporting your custom base, new features don't matter).
This is where a change management board comes into play. If you have the management get into a room, along with key developers, and prioritize the list of projects, and most importantly get buy in from the participants this is how you get a hold of the project queue. Of course, this doesn't account for the "quickie projects" that get dropped on you, but that's where you need your manager to step in and take the arrows for you so that you don't get distracted.
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I actually had this happen to me - one of the admins reporting to me left, and I ended up taking
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That is where the Agile angst I am seeing in the comments seems off. People over Process does not mean you don't have process or that having process excludes people. It means that the people are more important than the process. A change board is a pretty good process, but it is useless without the right people.
Re:By not having the situation in the first place (Score:5, Insightful)
Big 'A' agile NEVER works, full stop. Small 'a' agile IS an iterative approach with the size of the iterations scaled to the project's needs. Pairing will happen as deemed necessary by the actual developers. Note that for small projects, the number of iterations may be 1 and the size 100%.
Like most management fads, big 'A' agile is a crude attempt to proceduralize the natural result of a group of well motivated and skilled developers with a management that knows when and how to stay out of the way such that a pack of monkeys saddled with a micro-managing idiot can supposedly produce the same result. It never works.
If you do have a pack of monkeys and/or a micro-managing idiot, they'll find a way to mess up anyway and if you don't, then slavish dedication to 'the Method' will make them act like said monkeys and idiots. At that point, success if proportional to the team's ability to game the system in order to shoehorn 'the right thing' into the provided framework. They would have done better dedicating that effort to the actual project.
Meanwhile, the true Scotsmen^wbelievers will be happy to tell you why the 99 out of 100 projects that failed miserably weren't really following the one true methodology.
Re:By not having the situation in the first place (Score:5, Funny)
The true problem with agitating against Agile is that you may succeed, in which case it will be replaced with a new, shinier, and even more frustrating silver bullet. Better the devil you know than the devil you don't know.
Play the game, use what's useful, assist others, produce your best, close your eyes and think of England.
Re:By not having the situation in the first place (Score:5, Insightful)
Not all projects are incremental in nature. You can't jump a chasm in five small steps.
There are projects where agile is a godsend, and there are projects where it will only do harm. Most are somewhere in the middle.
Get a project manager. (Score:5, Insightful)
Or get a manager that can get the priorities / resources changed.
Something isn't working at your company. If upper management is setting their expectations too high (or not providing the resources to meet those expectations) then someone needs to explain that to them.
Re:Get a project manager. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yeah, there's some bad math going on here somewhere. He either has enough requests to justify more resources at least until the backlog is cleared, or he's got users who are sending in too many requests and some should be denied.
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Microsoft Project. (Score:3)
Sure. Microsoft Project. But it won't work.
The problem is management, not software.
The developers will have to spend some of their time updating the charts .........
But the real problem will be that management can "work" the numbers so that their goals LOOK like they'll be met on the charts.
Then th
Re:Get a project manager. (Score:5, Informative)
Who/what is responsible for this?
1. Sales teams who put pressure on project architects for low costing.
2. Solution Architects who think each of their project member is Linus Torvalds.
3. Existence of bench resources. Idea is to underbid and deploy bench resources (unbilled) as anyway they are idle.
4. Unbilled bench resources suddenly getting deployed in new projects.
Re:Get a project manager. (Score:4, Insightful)
Theme these days is, get projects at any cost, we will figure it out once the project starts moving.
Survival in the global economy demands this kind of business strategy though. It sucks I know but when you are a small company with a tight budget and you got ferociously hungry competitors in a super-saturated market then you have some tough choices to make.
I used to think this way until I saw the books and I participated in sales meetings. When the choice is to sell fiction and hope for the best, or just hope another opportunity comes around in 3 months before you run out of money for payroll... well then maybe you wouldn't be so quick to point fingers at sales.
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The important thing is not to get a project manager, but to give the project manager the power to actually do things like manage priorities. I worked at a software start-up in 1999. At the first company meeting after I got there, I tried to get an idea of what were the highest priorities among the tasks facing the company at that point, not necessarily in order, but just putting a priority from "1" to "3" (I had originally suggested 1 to 5) on each item. Out of 20-odd items, one got a "2" and the rest we
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Uhh, project managers, business analysts, whatever you want to call them - should be IT people. They just aren't programmers. If they were programmers, the company should be paying them to program. The point of having IT business analysts is that they are IT and understand IT, but they spend their time interfacing with both IT programmers and the rest of the company.
I think your experiences are with companies that try to dictate projects with the end user group supplying the project manager. I don't thi
Re:Get a project manager. (Score:4, Interesting)
True story...
The business committed delivery of a huge pile of work in 60 days. Despite working around the clock with offshore resources, it still wasn't possible to make it.
Moral: The business needs to pay for any custom development out of their bonuses.
Right now- they pay a fixed amount ot IT and get an "all you can eat buffet" of work based on how hard and loud they scream.
Our current workload is 10 projects per person plus support work plus validation of data for deployment plus determining scope for the next release.
About 6 months ago they recognized we were grossly understaffed and just this week new resources started arriving. In 90 days, we'll have 4x the staff we do now. But that staff will be unproductive for 15 to 30 days after each one arrives.
Re:Get a project manager. (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah some of the worst mis-management stories I have heard came out of Texas. It is like business people over there aren't in the club unless they are abusing and overworking foreigners.
You got people who don't know how to manage, distributing far too much work to offshore resources who don't know how to develop software, for mission and business critical applications. If that is their idea of what offshoring brings to the table then they were doomed for failure even if they were appropriately staffed.
Software Development Lesson 1: NEVER assign mission critical or project critical tasks to offshore resources. NEVER. You want the ability to handle this and the knowledge for this in-house. Offshore the menial shit that doesn't matter or the bells and whistles, but NEVER offshore your bread and butter.
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Oh please. The on shore resources are working 80 hour weeks.
It's not about the on shore or off shore. The off shore resources are reasonably productive at a fraction of the price (after a couple months).
It's about assigning 22 people worth of work to 5 people. Be they on or off shore.
It's about assigning 50 projects and saying all of them are top priority.
And not slipping release dates - but holding you to them.
We already have people looking elsewhere. If the economy improved just a smidge, this would a
Re:Get a project manager. (Score:4, Informative)
This is somewhat appropriate here I think. Frequentlyt, Dilbert [dilbert.com] is on-target when management is not.
Staff (Score:4, Informative)
Sounds like you're honestly understaffed. If you guys are honestly working as hard as possible and things are still going unfinished then its not a problem of priorities - it's a manpower problem. Hire more people.
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Although additional staffing will probably help with the backlog, it might not be the right solution. For one thing, depending on the complexity of the systems involved, new hires may for a while reduce the efficiency of the existing staff. Sometimes new hires cause dates to slip which would have been met without the hire.
Also, just because your business units are requesting work be done doesn't mean that work is necessarily worth the investment. The individual business unit can't provide a good ROI eval
Don't let users score their own tasks (Score:5, Insightful)
Every user wants their project first and everybody else to wait. You can't let users declare their own priority unless there's a strictly followed grading system or rubric based on the priorities of the business. (Ex. Customer facing systems are more important than internal ones.) If you've got 5x of the "high" priority tasks either you;re making too many mistakes or priority inflation needs to be addressed with the users.
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If there was only some system where all of the users could post comments on the changes they wanted, and then the users themselves could rate the requests up or down, and the highest modded comments could get the most visibility.
Nah, a system like that could never work...
Re:Don't let users score their own tasks (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Don't let users score their own tasks (Score:5, Interesting)
This reminds me of an internal application I (re)developed for a very large shipping company. The company used conveyer belts to move most of their packages between sections of a central shipping hub. At the end of the shift the floor manager for each section would walk along to find issues with the belts in their sections, which could then be submitted with a rating of 1 (unimportant) to 5 (critical). Without fail, the floor manager would rate every problem 4 or 5. This caused issues when running reports for higher management because they would see a bunch of 4s and 5s that had been in the system for weeks. Despite instructions to stop doing this, it continued.
I took the (spaghetti code) application and rewrote it, including a large number of enhancements. One was that whenever one of the mechanics went in to check on a problem, they could assign it their own level of importance, which was usually far closer to the actual severity of the issue. Then they'd take care of what they considered 5s, then 4s, etc. In addition, the floor managers got to see what the mechanics rated an issue. While I'm sure they didn't like their problems being downgraded, it gave better feedback, and if they felt an issue was truly a 4/5 then they could take it up with someone higher; maybe they didn't explain the problem correctly. Reports also showed both ratings so there was a better understanding all around.
In short, let the users dictate their own priority, but with the understanding that it's not the ultimate priority. IT can then assign their own, and if the user feels wronged they can go higher about it. (Obnoxious users will do this anyway, but having a system that compares the two gives one more wall for them to climb.)
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Exactly!
But where I've seen this fall apart is when management lacks the backbone to manage properly.
EG. My wife works in I.T. for an area hospital, and their department is insanely stressed out and disorganized. They have a system in place, at least on paper, for assigning priority level to trouble tickets. (It's based on pretty clear criteria, such as only getting the highest level if it's a piece of computer equipment required by doctors in the process of doing medical procedures.) The problem is, any o
Clearly you need to invent a bell curve. (Score:5, Interesting)
Replace your current priority-tracking system with a floating point number. Add buttons to the interface that increase or decrease its value by small increments. Next to that, display a z-score [wikipedia.org], ideally presented offset so that the base priority is higher than zero (to reduce the number of negative numbers shown—or perhaps don't do this if you really want to discourage people from working on low-priority items.)
Statistics: fun for the whole family.
Typical problem (Score:2)
A weekly meeting with those dept heads and the dev head to discuss priorities.
This way, priorities are not your problem anymore. Dept heads "fight" / discuss / negotiate to be on top of list. Dev staff / budget issues come clear on the table.
It's a win win.
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This is probably the best way, avoid/ignore any priorities that don't come in from up top.
Even better is not using priorities at all: simply set milestones and allocate people to meet those milestones. If during the weekly meeting one of the dept heads wants something done quick let them fight it out with the dept heads whose pet project is currently underway and will be delayed due to "reduced resources". The impact of "pet project will be delayed by 4 weeks" is much more concrete than "pet project is now
Create more priorities (Score:5, Funny)
Obviously, you need more priorities. Nobody wants to mark his pet project as "low" priority, so you need to be creative. Ask marketing for help, and you'll end up with your new priorities: "High", "Very High", "Red", "Extreme", "Platinum", "Overclocked", "Done Yesterday", "Drop Everything", and "The Boss Is Watching".
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this will at least guarantee that less than 10% of projects will be marked as high priority. mission accomplished!
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Hold it!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
Wait a sec, you have projects that are not "Top Priority"?
I am currently working on 7 migration projects and every one of them is top priority. To top that off, the VP has told each and every PM that their project is top priority and I am dedicated to to getting their project done first.
Re:Hold it!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
I have done this before too. I had fun with it. I told the PMs that I would be working on the project of whichever PM was in the room looking over my shoulder. They literally had to stake out their turf if they wanted my time. This did two things... 1 if the issue was really important, they dropped their tasks also. 2) If another PM thought I should be on their tasks, they had to talk to whoever was in the room watching me. If no one was there, then I changed gears to the new request, and let my manager know that the constant shifting was slowing me down and preventing any real momentum.
Once the PMs werent able to blame me, management sorted things out and stopped giving me multiple top priorities, and most importantly, the PMs all realized that they had been sold a lie.
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I have seen this version fail. Two PMs sat in a room, and when presented with the resource limitation, by the resource they were both tasking at greater than full time, they agreed that they were both priority 1. One of them would be 1a and the other would be 1b. The resource quit on the spot.
% of list complete = % of bonus recieved (Score:5, Interesting)
Our company makes the corporate bonus program dependent on the project list. So everyone in the company has a vested interest in the projects that were defined near the beginning of the year. That's not to say that individual projects don't have the inevitable and constant feature creep, but release dates NEVER slip, we have a solid group of PM's I like to consider as enforcers, and a corporate structure where if something turns from green to yellow the person to blame immediately gets his schedule cleared until his piece is caught up. It seems to work, but it depends on everyone being pretty good at estimating work tasks, so there's a lot of double buffering to allow time for maintenance work... even then we stay really busy.
No one has a "low priority" project (Score:5, Insightful)
The answer lies in quantifying the project impact, not in calling it low/medium/high (which is a subjective, relative term). Also, as business grows (or shrinks), the measurement of impact should be weighted as well. For example, a project that generates $1M/yr in revenue is a big deal when you're making $2M/yr, but not as much when you're making $20M/yr.
In the end, limited resources need to be focused on the area where it makes the most impact rather than trying to solve everyone's problems. That is exactly what IT management's job is.
The other answer is that no group/team/company does this really well, it comes down to individual manager's or IC's style and how you dismiss the trivial requests.
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I agree. Make the priority based on a metric instead of customer driven. Return on investment is one that most business people understand ($$$ returned for $ spent). Exceptions being legal obligations such as law changes (it's not like businesses WANTED to implement SOX compliance or tax law changes or....etc.).
Sure, you'll get people that game the system in terms of how they evaluate the return and the cost, but it should be a lot harder than the old "mine is top priority because it's mine" that goes on
Screw the rankings ! (Score:5, Interesting)
The standard producer solution: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not a massive fan of agile, but in this case re-prioritizing tickets once a year is simply not often enough. Priorities change on a weekly basis. Your process should reflect that.
Ranking tasks (Score:3, Insightful)
Scheduling algorithm (Score:3, Interesting)
You have a classic scheduling algorithm problem. From the sound of things, your current algorithm is such that Project A, with priority n, submitted a month ago, will never complete so long as there exists a Project B, with priority > n, submitted more recently. There are scheduling algorithms that can help to deal with this, but only if you stick to them.
Also, publish your project list, including submitted dates, priorities, and lead stakeholders. If a VIP demands a project be inserted with a higher priority, make sure that that goes up on the board so that the other VIPs know why theirs was bumped back. Let them fight it out with each other.
10% (Score:5, Insightful)
From the sound of it, your problem is that anyone is allowed to mark an issue as high without restriction.
You say the goal is to have no more than 10% marked as high. So it seems the answer is simple. When you have 10% marked as high, you don't allow another item to be marked as high unless and until something else is removed from high.
That could be manually managed by a project manager, or it could be a business rule in your issue tracking database.
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Just look out for those that will automate generation of junk low-priority issues to get that percent of high-priority issues down to 10% so they can file their high-priority issue.
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I overlooked in my preview that Slashdot ate the less-than sign before the '10%'. I meant of course 'down to < 10%'.
Do not use priority levels, use a priority list. (Score:2, Insightful)
Priority levels "low", "medium" and "high" are useless, because every user thinks their features are high priority - and there is no way to differentiate high priority and really really high priority features.
Instead of priority levels, use a priority list of features or projects. All tasks go into this list, strictly ordered by priority. *No two tasks may ever share priorities*, the users (or their managers/representatives) must choose one to be above the other.
I have used pivotaltracker.com as a tool for
Relative priorities is the only solution (Score:2)
Rule of thumb (Score:2)
Remember that a typical IT project has used 95% of its planed resources when it reaches 95% achievement.
Then it will use 95% of its resources as well for the remaining 5%.
Have this rule in mind. Once you plan resources accordingly, your IT project management runs smoothly.
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That is because percent complete is a lie to make burn down charts look good. In addition, the pain of telling the truth that at 20% complete you have discovered that whatever you are working on will take twice as long is greater over a greater period of time than pretending you can complete on time until you are "95%" done, at which point, you then deal with the pain of saying you need the extra time. That way you have avoided several weeks of annoyance and negative attention from management.
This is direc
Analytic Hierarchy Process (Score:3, Insightful)
Basically you dont rank priorities of projects/tasks not on absolute scale, but on relative scale (project A vs project B, etc.) based on gut feelings, discussions with stakeholders, CFOs, etc. You end up with a matrix you have to solve to get normalized new absolute weights of each project/task.
I had the opportunity to use it once for new project kick off, I liked it and will use this method in the future. The book presents this method in context of other case studies, and it certainly has been used in many other situations.
There is only one top priority (Score:2)
I still get a paycheck (Score:3)
If they want us to be inefficient, that's their call, not mine. I still get a paycheck. I gave up a long time ago stressing out over the choices other people make that I have no control over. I just show up and do the job I agreed to do for the amount I agreed to get paid for it. If I don't like it, I can leave. I've had other companies call me, I know where I can go if it gets worse than the other companies already are.
If someone is working 60 hours/week every week, then they are either not good enough to get a job that doesn't require it, or don't have the cajones to tell their boss they will leave if it keeps up.
Deal with it, the only person to blame is
Portfolio Management (Score:3)
1. Understanding your current capacity by phase (initiation, requirements, dev, etc) by Role is critical. if you don't have this you are screwed from the start.
2. before you launch each project have you done discovery to understand business and IS hours needed to complete the project? Costs, ROI, CBA, etc. Basically do you understand the full costs (as best as you can at this point) vs. what you are getting?
3. Do you constantly go back to #2 as you complete each phase? If not you might be doing projects that no longer bring value.
4. Do you understand your strategies to help pick the projects regardless of their cost/benefits? For example if your goals are to win market share but all your projects focus on operational improvements you might have a problem?
5. Building off of #4 do you know all your strategies and what percentage you are focused on for each one? 50% operational improvement, 25% win the market, 10% shake up the market, etc.
6. Do you revisit all of the above as market changes? This should be done quarterly at least.
7. Do you understand how bringing in contractors helps your capacity model? It doesn't matter if you bring in 50 java developers but your bottle neck to testing. 8. Does leadership understand all of the above? are they educated and given data to show the above?
That would at least help your discussions.
Learn to say no (Score:4, Insightful)
1) Do what you agree to do on time and within budget
2) Say no to anything else
There are lots of books on the subject of time management, project management or the software development processes and they all boil down to these two rules. If you work in a company that does not allow you to say no, read one of those books and then explain to management why working with $method would greatly improve everything (including the coffee). As soon as you get them to agree to $method you can use $method to say no (i.e. $feature is not in our sprint, $task is on the KanBan board and blocked by $actually_important_task, etc).
If you have no support from management, consider updating you resume.
Here are three books that I found worth reading:
Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Busines by David J. Anderson [amazon.com]
Time Management for System Administrators by Thomas A. Limoncelli [amazon.com]
Agile Software Development with Scrum by Ken Schwaber and Mike Beedle (Author) [amazon.com]
The most interesting part are the case studies and how the authors manage to say "no" in a management-compatible way.
Use the Scotty principal. (Score:5, Funny)
Playing with the priorities doesn't help (Score:2)
It's not clear why the priorities are increasing. If management is setting high priorities on everything because they've figured out that anything lower won't get done, you have to either stop that behavior (ha!) or set up a "shadow" priority list with the real priority for each project. If priorities are rising because a project really does become more urgent as its due date approaches and passes... well, the system is working. You can't have more work than resources and expect it all to get done, so if
Relative priorities (Score:4, Insightful)
"High" is not a priority. "Before this, and after this", that's a priority. List your projects in order of priority. In order to increase one's priority, you have to change it's position on the list. This means that if you increase the priority of one task, you necessarily decrease the priority of other tasks. Obviously, since your time is finite, priority is zero sum.
1 in 1 out (Score:3)
Set a maximum of at most N top priority projects. If someone wants to upgrade project X, another top prio project must be downgraded. That should make people think twice before suggesting a prio upgrade.
One possible solution (Score:4, Interesting)
If you're in a larger organization, you need a project manager who is powerful enough to tell 14 of the 15 managers with "top priority" projects to go to hell and get away with it.
The other thing you need to do is stop looking at priorities as categories, and instead think in terms of scheduling. If somebody wants to get their project done sooner, they have to move ahead in the scheduling, and the only way to move ahead in the scheduling is to negotiate with somebody who's project is scheduled before there's. For instance, assume developer A will be working on Foo, then Bar, then Baz, and developer B will be working on Fred, Barney, then Baz. If the person pushing Baz wants to get it done sooner, he has to convince the owners of Bar and Barney to move back in the line. Make the schedule very public, along with whatever changes occurred in the last week.
The point of doing that is it makes the shouting occur somewhere else, so you can get things done.
Poker Chips (Score:2)
Note: set a cap limit of one year's chips at any one time, or some joker will hoard them and then spend lavishly on stupid projects.
Iterate Faster (Score:3)
Get a scrum master (not a project manager, those are worthless). Train people in Agile or at least some form of iterative process if you decide against an Agile environment.
Since your delivery rates are slipping start estimating time for projects and see which give the most value; complete those first.
This whole idea that things can wait a year to be looked at was ridiculous in 1990. If you're not interative already you're decades behind.
Rules and Numbers (Score:3)
Not that this is being perfectly implemented at the company I work at, (we're working on it) I suggest changing the rules for your prioritization.
Rule 1: Projects will be prioritized with numbers, not words. No more 'high', 'medium', 'low', 'if you have time'. Projects will be assigned a priority number. The lower the number, the higher the priority.
Rule 2: Projects cannot have the same priority number. Got five projects ranked 1? Somebody has to decide which one is really project 1, and which are really 2, 3, 4, and 5. It doesn't matter who makes the decisions, as long as someone makes them.
If you're IT department doesn't set rules for non-IT departments regarding priority, and enforce them, then you will have the standard chaos.
Use Scrum (Score:3)
We also have technical support issues to deal with. We attempt to manage them during sprint planning by planning time to resolve them, considering our past history. On occasion, the issues mean that some priorities can't be handled during the sprint, but we usually still get most of our important work done.
Rating each item in a long list of critical modifications is not what you really want, anyway. What you really want is a periodic answer to the question above. It is almost always easier to answer that one question than it is to prioritize a long modification list. The question naturally forces decision makers to think in well-defined, manageable chunks, and it forces teams to estimate well and to deliver results regularly. Scrum puts ceremony around the question.
Re: (Score:2)
rank ordering (Score:2)
You don't rate your projects priorities to an absolute scale, that invites exactly the abuse you are seeing. Instead, you rank order them, and work on the items at the top of the list. You may need a high level decision maker to make choices in the event that there is disagreement among project owners about relative rank.
Cap priority levels (Score:2)
Say you've got 100 features to implement and 10 priority levels. Only permit 20% at each level. If you don't have some mechanism in place, your stakeholders are naturally going to call everything lvl 9-10.
The Rosanne Barr Method (Score:3)
Step 2: Throw the stack of envelopes in the air.
Step 3: Sort priority by A) which ones landed face up, and B) the order in which they landed - i.e., topmost face up envelope is priority 1, second topmost face up is priority 2, etc.
While that method may, on the surface, seem idiotic, it's no more so than the methods employed by most companies I've worked for.
I had a system for this at my old job... (Score:3)
It was pretty basic, and damned effective. We had an online request system with three priority levels (Low, Medium, High), and a warning that choosing the incorrect priority level for your project would cause it to be delayed. If someone chose High priority when we knew that it wasn't (like they wanted a test server to play with), it instantly got demoted to Low and the customer had to wait an extra week for it to be done.
After seeing their co-workers low and medium priority projects being completed long before their own, most people took the hint and started categorizing their requests properly. The ones who didn't waited a lot. Sure, they occasionally bitched to management about the delay, but we usually had the work done before our management even bothered to respond to their complaint.
Take the emotial element out (Score:3)
Nobody wants to hear their project is not a priority. Terms like High,Medium,Low etc are attached peoples ego. What you need to do is come up with some other system of classification. Ideally one that does not make it entirely clear what 'priority' is even attached. Use a system like "Customer facing, feature", "Customer facing cosmetic", "Internal process improvement", "Bug fix", "Regulatory Compliance", etc.
These things that have a more objective criteria, a requester project is customer facing or it is not, its cosmetic (I want this to be different font size) or its not. You get the idea. Next you get upper management to assign a "priority" to your project classification criteria, which you don't need to publish to the rest of the organization.
This way you don't Bob, feeling like he less important than Ted because his project was not classified at as high a priority. You avoid the whole power conflict aspect.
Ask for ROI Estimates (Score:5, Insightful)
Ask for ROI estimates instead of (or as well as) priority estimates. This won't work in every environment, but where it works, it can have a lot of upside.
I put it in play at a company where the engineers worked directly with marketing. One of the marketing guys was a pure sociopath -- lied about his priorities every single time, regardless of the upside for the company, just to keep his numbers up. After one particularly expensive project that generated about enough revenue to cover the electricity for the coffeemaker, I asked him for an estimate of ROI on the next project.
As it happens, he was actually a pretty sharp analyst, and he gave me some really accurate figures. They were low, and he acknowledged that his new project wasn't really high priority compared to the other things on the plate. He didn't even seem upset about it -- once he had run the numbers, he couldn't deny reality. It was the numbers' fault, not mine.
As noted above, this obviously won't work in every situation. When it does, however, it is quite effective. It also has some significant upside for marketing the IT department internally. If you keep track of the estimated ROI figures, and follow up for actual figures, you can make a clear case that IT is a profit center, not a cost center (as it is often perceived).
Do the Math (Score:4, Interesting)
Any worker who is working on more than one thing at a time has their time multiplied by a "task switching co-efficient" which is
1.2 - ( 0.20 * number of projects they are doing simultaneously).
So a worker doing only 1 project is fully productive, 2 projects, they are only 80% productive, 3 projects, they are 60% productive, etc...
Each "customer" (manager) gets shown what their calculated delivery date is, and what it would be if their project was deferred until it could have only dedicated workers on it. They also get shown predictions of what the delivery dates are if more resources are added to the development group.
It blows the minds of the customer(Managers) when they see deliveries get later when resources are added! Each worker has a familiarity co-efficient that is calculated by multiplying the inverse of the project complexity rank by the number of weeks they have been on the project. How valid is all this stuff? per individual - not very valid, but overall it forces the other managers to understand the impacts of resources and changes on the amount of time it will take their project to get done. By making it mathematical, and more realistic than simply (Manweeks of work / # of workers) It forces them to look more realistically at the problem.
I have an internal web page that lets other customer/managers tweak the schedule to see what happens when they make changes. I encourage them to use it during meetings so each customer/manager can see what the other customer/manager thinks each others project should be delayed by. (They fight each other, not development.)
I also use Individual co-efficients for each worker: productivity, affinity, flexibility, robustness as well as each worker having a different calendar. These measures are kept private. Only I see them, but they are used to calculate the time it takes to produce each project. They are kept private for 2 reasons, #1 - the managers waiting for delivery will try to force the development department to put the engineers they perceive as best, on 'their' project. #2 - to protect the privacy of the engineers. These rankings are arbitrary and , being produced by a human, are also fallible. I refuse to let these "labels" become public, there is to much potential for harm.
Affinity- a ranking of that person's Project domain knowledge and how expert they are with the languages and tools being used on that project (and how much they like/dislike the tools or the domain). Used as part of their productivity rating, which - note this: is different for each project!
flelxibility- People multi-task differently. some folks are 140% productive when working on just 1 project and drop to 50% productive when they have to work on more than one project at a time. So each person gets their own co-efficient on this as well. Some people are best used by dedicating them to one thing at a time. Forcing the "140% on 1 and 50% on 2 " people to multi-task is incredibly stupid.
robustness: This a measure of 2 things - First - how "strong" is their code algorithmicly? eg - does their code do the work by being well thought out and therefore have a 'simple' flow? Or is it a long running chain that handles each condition as a special case instead of having the solution fall out by design.
Second, What is the defect rate in their code? (includes mechanical/transcriptional defects as well as algorithmic and domain defects)
Many people in software development are naturally "single threaded" and I laugh whenever I see the job ads that include "Must be a good multi-tasker" for software developers. Forcing developers to multi-task is always a bad idea in that it usually slows down all the work being down. In IT
Yet another example of mis-management (Score:3)
If you were to suggest at say a shipping company that at the end of the year you dump all the unshipped packages in the ocean and start with a clean slate... welll, some might do that but it is not policy! Just practice.
But to be serious, the idea that you got more work then people to do it and that this is done year after year is insane. You can't have any sensible planning this way. It means projects that are not high priority have no chance of being completed, so they are elevated and this just adds to the load.
There are only two solutions, either optimize your production methods OR increase the amount of staff working on it. Yeah yeah, training new staff costs time but if that is your excuse, just resign and kill yourself. Understaffing is only fixed by the company going bust, so if you don't fix it now, you will only have even less hours to train new people in the future.
You can of course start to reduce the number of projects but they SHOULD all be mandated by business needs and anyway, changing this when you are already overloaded will just consume even more resources and telling people THEIR needs are not important... well, do you want to continue working at said company?
Any other methods are just putting your head in the sand and hoping that with continued growth of the company, customer base, feature set and code complexity, things will magically get better.
If one of my former employers is any example... (Score:3)
...just pressure the staff to work late every night and all weekend, but keep paying them only for 40 hours per week. And cancel all leave around Christmas.
Discipline. (Score:3)
I have dealt with this issue many many times in my career.
You need the discipline to know what is important, what is not, and to ignore the things which are not. That is it.
This is always a sign of management failure. Quit your job and find a new company to work for, because the managers you are working with are incompetent.
If you are managing your own workload, see my second sentence above.
What Worked for Me (Score:3)
Have this meeting every other month (at least), because priorities change. One of the main goals here is just to make sure that everyone knows what you have going on. When one random director gives you a project he doesn't realize you have 900 other projects going on, how could he? A big part is just giving everyone more visibility into IT's workload and priorities.
Show that they cost money and time (Score:3)
Stack the priorities up, if they must have them.
Show them what the added cost will be. If they're willing to pay for it all, its their money and their project. Just be sure they're doing with eyes open.
Re:Get a project manager (Score:5, Interesting)
It sounds like they need more than one project manager and a number of additional worker-bees to get the jobs done.
Start by showing the problem to senior management and tell them flat-out that there is no way to get all the projects done on schedule unless they hire enough people that each project has enough people on it to get the job done. It's always incumbent on workers at each level to give their best (i.e. worst-case) estimates of how much work is required to execute a project and how much time it requires. (Some work can't be accelerated past a certain point by adding more people.)
There are three responses that might generate:
* "you'll just have to work harder" This response is not unusual but tells you you're going to fail anyway and is a signal to get out of the organization before it crashes and burns.
* they'll cancel some projects and focus their people on the remaining ones
* they'll hire some more warm bodies to get more work done.
Also, you need a way to shield the people working on each project from interruptions generated from outside the project and the project managers need to insulate their people from scope creep.
Re: (Score:2)
Here is hoping you aren't suffering from feature creep also.
Re:Get a project manager (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been in the same situation. More workers were needed so that new features, rewriting of core features for stability as well as general bug fixes could be done simultaneously. That was on the company's key product that generated >50% of the entire company's revenue ($10M company). Aside from the primary product slipping the CEO was heavily invested in his pet project for a new service, siphoning off existing resources and claiming all new hires. The new service was to compliment the existing product (but could be resold to competitors as well).
After spending too much time trying to convince management of the obvious and watching all my coworkers become demotivated (hard to stay motivated when you spend all your time barely succeeding at treading water in an industry you should be swimming in) I made the obvious but difficult decision. I left. I make more money and work for a company that is focused on a single product. If you can't do a bunch of things well, then focus on one you can do well.
I've seen it a bunch of times. Egos get in the way and management is focused on doing things that make them feel like they have ownership or are in control or are doing something 'cool' to brag to their cohorts about. The difficult thing is to drop everything but what you are good at. A friend saved a failing middleware company by doing exactly that. They were in the hole working on a bunch of revenue sucking 'products' that could have been the next greatest piece of middle ware (can you say bubble mentality? Great middleware? YA). The saving grace is they had a successful support and service side of the business. He dropped everything but the service and support then focused on having that be as profitable as possible. A decade later they are still alive and the company has the best employee remuneration of their field for the market they are involved in. The company would have gone under in months without more investment money had they continued to try and make a product. Looking back it is now easy to see that their big software products plans would have never panned out.
Re:Get a project manager (Score:5, Insightful)
At my job, when us salaried programmers start averaging more than 40hr/week, they hire a new person. Once that person gets up to speed, we're working under 40hr/week, so they expand our projects.
Happy workers are good workers.
Re:Get a project manager (Score:5, Insightful)
"Also, you need a way to shield the people working on each project from interruptions generated from outside the project and the project managers need to insulate their people from scope creep"
BINGO!
Don't know how many times I have to stop the project I am on because the boss's kid can't get his mac to work on the home wireless.
The IT guys wear many hats unfortunately.
A good idea is to get most projects are done after hours, work output is doubled seemingly because you are not pulled from the project every 15 minutes. Would be nice to be on the after hours team.
The problem is in no way unique to IT departments. Every department suffers from the same thing. I manage hardware engineers and we face the same issues. Everybody thinks that because a problem is his biggest priority it should be your biggest priority.
But I recognize that there's a particular problem in IT departments. They have day-to-day issues that have to be dealt with on a timely basis as well as long-term issues that absolutely must be dealt with but on a longer schedule. You have to segment the problem somehow.
Some companies have a group that only handles system-down and user complaints and other people handle the longer-term projects. Some companies have babysitters for upper management.
Re:Get a project manager (Score:5, Informative)
Some companies have a group that only handles system-down and user complaints and other people handle the longer-term projects. Some companies have babysitters for upper management.
This.
You will be amazed how much more can get done on projects when you have dedicated Firefighers and Babysitters. Another helpful suggestion is to make sure that the Babysitters have teeth. Upper management is not going to care what IT processes are in place to keep the whole infrastructure from devolving into anarchy. They want what they want and they want it fast.
Make sure your babysitters are the best of the best, and make sure that they can affect immediate change in IT without having to go through the proper channels. If they need to open a port on the firewall then they should have the passwords and access to do so. If they need to have an account created make sure that they can log into the LDAP server and create one, etc...
So many IT people get angry about this claiming that they shouldn't get special treatment. Bullshit. They should get special treatment because they are the Upper Management, they are pretty damn special. You don't want them waiting and you don't want their IT requests to slow down the project guys at all.
Re:Get a project manager (Score:5, Insightful)
They also need the balls to say "NO!" when appropriate. And then suggest a working alternative.
"No, you can't install that application you downloaded from some dude in Romania. I've looked, and it is not what you think it is. But here's another way to do the thing you need to do."
"No, we won't make that Excel file editable by the entire company. It won't work like you think it will. But here's a workaround."
Re:Get a project manager (Score:4, Insightful)
And this is what makes the best of the best. The ability to extract from the customer what they need and then be able to offer the best solution in the framework provided. The tech skills are only handy in the second part. The first requires great communication skills. Something that can be lacking in some IT workers.
Re:Babysitters/firefighters (Score:5, Informative)
Ye flipping gods- another one.
No. Just No.
Sarbanes-Oxley did NOT make it illegal to change production software in public companies. What it DID do was make it a requirement that the management of a company was legally responsible for the financial reporting of the company. So even if the financial reporting software had a problem, they are still on the hook for it. All the IT auditing firms got together and agreed that meant the FINANCIAL software needed to have all the changes be approved by the proper applications owners and that there needed to be an approval process, documentation, and all the other stuff that makes auditors (and no one else) happy.
Those same auditors have pushed that in order to avoid risk, EVERY software application should go through that same process even if it has nothing to do with finance. Risk-adverse management agreed. So now most public companies force Sarbanes-Oxley compliant processes on every bit of development, costing huge amounts of wasted time and money.
Skipping it doesn't mean it is illegal. It means that if your company is audited and a set of software is found to be the cause then it is possible the management might get fined. To the best of my knowledge, this has NEVER happened. And I feel comfortable saying it is unlikely to ever happen.
Re:Too many subject matters here (Score:4, Informative)
One of the problems w/ project management when one is bombarded w/ projects is that one has to have a continuous line of communication to the boss, which obviously means less time actually working. Oh, that, and meetings regarding the project as well. One solution is an online status tracking system that gives anybody an instant status level as to where in the project it's there. That way, one can determine where the bottleneck is, and work towards addressing it there.