I see too many teams feel frustrated because their managers say the work takes “too long.” (The team feedback loop is the inside of the onion for how agile the organization can be. See Multiple Short Feedback Loops Support Innovation.)
The longer the work takes, the more pressure managers exert on the team and the product leader. (Teams and product leaders might exert pressure on themselves, too. But I mostly see external pressure.) When teams and product leaders feel more pressure, they tend to:
- Start more work, which increases the WIP (Work in Progress).
- The more WIP means each piece of work takes longer, lowering throughput.
- As throughput goes down, everyone else pressures the team to do more.
Teams and product leaders feel behinder and behinder.
But teams can change their questions as they walk the board, especially if they ask about aging. Here are the three aging questions:
- How old is this item?
- Is this item still worth doing?
- What prevents us from finishing this?
Here's why these questions work.
How Old is This Item?
Items get old for many reasons. A common reason is that “something” is blocking old items. That something could be too much WIP inside the team. Or, the team needs someone else to finish the work. (The team might need an answer from someone else.)
But the first question is “how old.”
Is This Item Still Worth Doing?
If an item has been blocked for weeks or months, I always ask if it's still worth doing. Because if no one cared about this item enough to unblock it before now, is this item actually still valuable?
(Often, the answer is no.)
But, let's assume the item is still worth doing. Now it's time to solve this problem.
What Prevents Us From Finishing?
Every team is different. However, here are some answers I've seen teams generate:
- We need the entire team to work on this one item, take the next few days, and finish it. (See Pairing, Swarming, and Mobbing.)
- Even if the entire team works on this, we don't have enough expertise. We need help from someone else outside the team. (This has a real Cost of Delay.)
- Someone else needs to answer a specific question so the team can proceed
- We need other teams to help us because it's cross-product and the other team “owns” the code.
Your team might have different answers.
But when teams look at aging, they often change how they work.
Aging Questions Helps the Team Focus on Throughput
Even if teams don't know about Little's Law, they often realize that too much WIP hurts them. But the teams might not realize how the WIP got so high. That's the point of looking at the age of each item.
The more long-lived items, the lower the throughput. Since low throughput creates more pressure, teams have several ways to increase throughput.
This is where the product leaders need to make challenging choices. I almost always ask these questions:
- Should we finish the current WIP (and not start more) before we address these old items? If your team uses iterations, you might want to finish this iteration and then address the older items.
- Should we stop everything we're doing now and address those old items?
- A combination of the above?
For me, the answer of “choose one item, finish that, and then address the next item” works best. I've said before that I don't know how much is the right amount of WIP for your team, but I suspect the answer is less than you have now.
In Create Your Successful Agile Project, I suggested that a first cut at the “right” amount of WIP was the floor of the number of people divided by two. That way, no one worked alone. As with all WIP management, you might need to experiment to find the right number for your team.
Change your questions to focus on aging and you'll finish more of the right work. That will help you increase throughput. Increased throughput will help you ease the pressure, especially external pressure from others. And, you'll get to decrease your cycle time. All good outcomes for a team.