When I see a team routinely failing to complete their commitments, my first assumption is that they are overcommitting. Humans overcommit wantonly, and teams of humans do the same unless they take explicit measures to avoid it. But I started wondering about other causes of chronic missed commitments. One of the biggest that came to mind is what I call hidden re-prioritization.
Let’s take an example of a team using Scrum with two-week sprints. They take on ten stories in a sprint: A-J, prioritized in that order. Ideally, they work on story A first, then B, then C, etc. Often, they will launch multiple stories at once in parallel, opening, say, stories A-D at the start of the sprint, and then moving on to story E, etc. Opening too many in parallel is risky, but that’s a topic for another post.
Now let’s say that on day 2, a team member jumps down the board and starts working on story J. It’s fairly obvious that they are doing so, and it might raise a question: why aren’t you working with the rest of us on these higher priority stories? There might be some reasonable explanation, but it’s worth having the discussion. Otherwise, what’s the point of prioritizing in the first place? Similarly, if the person starts work that’s not even on the board, they are even more obviously ignoring the prioritization that the team set out in their planning. Once again, not necessarily a problem, but worth an explicit team discussion to ensure it’s the best move they can make to meet their sprint commitments.
Now let’s look at a trickier example. Mid-sprint, a team member is working on a story, and decides to “go the extra mile”, doing work that is outside the scope of the story. Definitely well-intentioned, and very likely valuable, based on the assumption that we trust our people. But the question is not whether it is valuable; the question is whether it is the most valuable thing they can do next. When they make this decision, it is implicitly saying the following:
I am adding a new story to the sprint which includes this additional work, and I am placing it in higher priority order than any of the other stories on the board. I am doing so without consulting my teammates and the Product Owner/Manager, because I know better than any of them.
Except they aren’t saying it out loud. No one has a chance to react until it’s too late and the time has been spent. My guess is that most team members would never in a million years speak the statement above. And yet by doing work outside the scope of the agreed-upon story, that is the reality of what they are doing.
Looking at my own life, I see that this hidden act of re-prioritization happens all the time. We call it procrastination sometimes (“I believe doing this Sudoku puzzle is more important than the dishes I said I would clean up”), and other times cover our choices with fibs (“sorry I’m late; the day got away from me” when we actually made an implicit choice to prioritize spending a little more time finishing up a conversation over honoring our commitment to arrive on time). Heck, I’m writing this post right now, telling myself it’s important work, despite the fact that I didn’t explicitly weigh it against other things I have to do.
That gets to the root of the problem: the lack of explicit intention. There is nothing wrong with changing course. There’s nothing wrong with letting your brain rest by doing Sudoku, or deciding to write a blog post you’ve been thinking about for a while now because, well, when else are you going to do it? The problem is with failing to account for the impact of the decision. Think of it as a leak: when you finish the day and wonder where all your time went, maybe you have a leak somewhere. In teams, doing this unilaterally has the additional downside of cheating your teammates of the chance to weigh in on the decision.
If this is happening frequently, then it’s very likely that it leads to the team missing its commitments chronically: the work completed according to the committed stories represents only a fraction of the total work done. Even if a team commits to a reasonable amount of work, they miss the commitment because they do a slightly different set of work.
To counter this:
- Look at your commitment completion rate (aka predictability): # stories completed / # stories committed. If you estimate stories, you can use story points instead of # stories for a more precise number. If your average completion rate is less than 90%, discuss why.
- When you want to add work–whether at the macro (a new story) or micro (something out of scope within a story) level–, make sure to discuss it with the team. Be sure to separate the ideas of “valuable” and “the most valuable thing we can do next”.
- Remember that there is no harm in departing from the plan to hit your goals; the danger is in doing so without explicit attention, which introduces the risk of hidden re-prioritization.