A plot twist on a sad tale…
I wrote this, a bit tongue-in-cheek, the other day on my LInkedIn profile:
If you have seen or experienced it, or you're just OK taking my word on it, you might ask yourself: fair enough, but what is the alternative? How exactly could the engineering teams exhibit a different behavior? One perhaps that brings about a higher level of maturity of their delivery process.
Again, if you're OK taking my word on it, I am happy to share some thoughts… Though I can't get either the bonus or the onus for whether it will work or not in your context. But I do happen to know for a fact and from benchmarking that the patterns which I am about to describe are helpful and robust.
The first part is a pre-condition, which can be framed as both a matter of self-awareness (jargon for "you know your stuff") as well as credibility (jargon for "people are fine taking your word on stuff"):
You have a delivery system in place, which is stable enough, meaning you know empirically what is capable of delivering in a given time frame, and that imposes limits to what is currently going on (i.e., WIP limit), and through that you have shown explicitly your customers can trust the predictability of your services.
Without that pre-condition, I would be very skeptical of the success chances of any engineering team to sort of push back when already having too much and getting pressure with more work pushed down and from different directions. It just is not going to happen that easily, that way.
Taking that for granted, what can next? Well, I actually don't think I need to write much else, because that was precisely where I was coming from the last couple of posts here:
The gist of it being really this:
You take a more nuanced and contextually (value = risk assessment) relevant perspective on what should be done next (priority), and that nudges and hopefully leads to meaningful conversations.
Then next time that a new rushed demand comes from someone somewhere, you can hold up a sort of a 'mirror' against that demand with that sense of urgency, and do it in a way that doesn't come across as just pushing back for the sake of it, it's not defensive.
It could sound something like this:
Hey John Doe, I am glad you had this new idea, and I am happy to consider it further. You know that we already have a lot going on here, but we should always be open and ready to change gears if need be. Let's shape that up, let's use that little profile assessment thing I showed you some time back, see how that looks like against other options we are considering or even what is currently going on. And take from there.
It will be what will be… Non-speculative, highly factual, mature and robust way to go about making decisions, and managing risks, and stakeholders, and by playing offense rather than reacting and getting defensive.
The actual conversation will probably sound a bit differently, somewhat more formal, perhaps done in stages. But I think you get the spirit.
By Rodrigo Sperb, feel free to connect (I only refuse invites from people clearly with an agenda to ‘coldly’ sell something to me), happy to engage and interact