“Should unplanned work be allowed after the sprint starts?”

One of those questions which comes up again and again. And it came up last week when I visited a clients offices – yes I actually visited a client! The answer to this question is, as often happens: It depends. So let me give you my thinking.

First, many teams have a rule that work must be scheduled in the sprint planning meeting, after which this is fixed. Teams have a right to make this rule so if this is a team rule – what Kanban folk call a policy – then work is not allowed in.

This rule is based on a strict interpretation of Scrum. The thinking – particularly in early implemenations of Scrum – was that changing priorities was a big problem for teams and therefore fixing the work to be done for a few weeks made sense. In the event of that things did change the team would declare an “abnormal termination of sprint” and move to start a new sprint with new priorities.

Now for some teams this makes complete sense. Barring work from entering the sprint after planning makes complete sense. Equally it makes sense for team members to only do work scheduled in the sprint and refuse all other work. So, it depends… when a team is troubled by new work appearing, priorities changing, and when a team are expected to deliver something new – when their overarching priority is not support but building something new – then this approach makes complete sense.

But, don’t follow this rule just because you think Scrum says so. I just had a quick look at the latest Scrum Guide doesn’t actually mention abnormal termination of sprint. It does say “No changes are made that would endanger the Sprint Goal” which then leads us into a conversation about the sprint goal but let’s hold that for now.

Now ring fencing the team and the sprint like this solves one set of problems but it creates another set. If the team are aiming to be reactive why would they not pick up work?

And as teams increasingly become DevOps or SecDevOps, or BizDev, or whatever, things get more complicated. It would be irresponsible to hold a “no work enters the sprint” if the live server was down or a security hole had been found. But at the same time, being hyper-reactive has a downside because the team would be constant distracted.

Ultimately it is the Product Owner who should have the final say on whether work is unplanned work is accepted or not but when you have a customer on the phone someone else may be forced into a decision.

I apply two tests: is the unplanned work really urgent? – or could it wait a few days and be considered in the next sprint. (Or even queued in the backlog for longer.)

Second, is the unplanned work valuable? – namely, is it more valuable than the work the team are doing and would be displaced by this work. Ideally it would valuable enough to justify the disruption it causes by late entry too.

Hence I like to talk about urgent but valuable unplanned work. Just because something appears after sprint planning doesn’t mean it is not valuable. If the work is urgent, and if it is valuable enough, then it deserves to enter the sprint and get done.

However I like to build in two feedback loops. First, as the work arises, does the person raising the work understand the disruption this will cause? Are they prepared to accept that some other work may not get done?

I like to make this real: pull up your board and show the requester the consequences. Let them prioritise the work against the current planned work. This can make the unplanned work go away.

Second, mark the late-breaking work so you can track it through the system – on a physical board I would use a yellow card. At the end of the sprint review how many yellow cards you have and talk about whether the right decision was made.

Over time, as you build up your data – and stock of done yellow cards – you can reason about the cards and decide your long term action. For example,

You might want to make an allowance in sprint planning for unplanned work: suppose your team averages 3 yellow cards a sprint, then, when you are planning the sprint allow space for them.

If you have many yellow cards regularly you might even want to move to a Kanban model or split the team.

Review the requests, what are the common themes? – is there a module which is particularly troublesome, would some remedial work help reduce the unplanned work.

Or is there someone in particular who raises unplanned work? Should the team leaders talk to this person and see if they could change their behaviour, perhaps they could make their requests a few days earlier.

Maybe you want to ring-fence a team member to deal with unplanned work while the rest of the team pushes on with the main work.

As I said at the top of this post, the unplanned work question comes up a lot. I discussed it in Xanpan so if you want more examples go there. And if you have any other suggestions please comment on this post.

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How do you design a car? – It is one of the most famous diagrams in the agile world drawn by Henrik Kniberg.

I’m guessing many readers know this already: one approach (top of the diagram) is to iteratively design and build all the pieces, put them together and you have a car. This is one interpretation of iterative but until you put the pieces together there is no feedback and no value.

After all, who wants half a car? We know what we want from a car, right? Who needs feedback? Who wants a car with three wheels? – Why waste time experimenting?

The alternative, advocated by minimally viable product people everywhere is to redefine the problem; we don’t want a car so much as transportation, we could start with a very simple – and quick to deliver – transportation system (the skateboard). Because it is delivered sooner we get feedback sooner. We see how people use it, and evolve it over a series of iterations into a motorised car.

Since I know this, you know this and it is on the back of every agile cereal packet one can rest assured that Larry Page, Tim Cook and Jeff Bezos know this, right?

Well no, not according to the Financial Times recently. The FT carried a piece about the development of autonomous cars – “Robotaxis: have Google and Amazon backed the wrong technology?” – paywalled. Since we already have the sort taxi someone drives the development effort goes into advancement.

For the last few years Google/Waymo, Apple and others have sunk billions of dollar – yes billions – into developing self-driving cars. And of course, we all know what we want from a car, even a self-driving car so this is an engineering problem.

These cars now work but there are a number of challenges before the achieve world dominance. Most of the challenges now are less to do with the technology and more to do with the market: customer acceptance, insurance, pricing, etc. Still, billions more are needed before any return can be achieved. In other words: Google etc. took the first approach, build the pieces.

What is less well know, and what the FT writes about, is that another group of companies has take the other approach. Component suppliers like Bosch and Magna, and tech companies like Mobileye (Intel) have been developing discrate technologies that can be incorporated into existing cars which evolve towards self-driving dream. Not only is this cheaper but it is easier to market and clear regulatory hurdles because humans are assisted in driving not replaced. (Tesla is also in this camp as they add more and more capabilities to their auto-pilot features and have been getting feedback from real customers for years.)

Now it seems evolutionary approach may win-out against the big clean sheet of paper. The race is not over yet but the evolutionary suppliers are making money while the new designer are still burning cash. The evolutionary suppliers are integrating their tech into cars and getting regulatory approach while the new designers have to navigate many regulators.

Engineers often object to the evolutionary model because: “we need to see the big picture”, “you need an architecture”, “you can’t evolve a skateboard into a car”. And indeed, one of the Google engineers, quoted in the FT saying:

“Conventional wisdom would say that we’ll just take driver assistance systems and we’ll kind of push them and … over time, they’ll turn into self-driving cars … well that’s like saying that if I work really hard at jumping, one day I’ll be able to fly.”

Chris Urmson, 2015

When you consider the problem purely in engineering terms this rings true, but while one needs to respect engineering it is not the only frame of reference. One need to consider the commercial and marketing aspects, as well as customer acceptance and other factors. To give any single line of thought a privileged position is to expose yourself to risks from the others.

At the end of the day, as I have argued repeatedly: engineering is about creating solutions within a context, within constraints. To any given problem there are many potential solutions – many ways to slice the onion. The “best” solution is the solution which best fits those constraints.

The evolutionary approach allows you get feedback sooner which allows you to uncover those constrains sooner, that allows for course corrections and it also means less time and money has been spent on solutions which don’t meet the constraints.

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Agile Uprising has just published a new podcast they recorded with my a few weeks ago about, well OKRs and my book Succeeding with OKRs in Agile.

Succeeding with OKRs in Agile podcast is available for download now – for free

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Building software is not like digging a hole in the ground: your target changes as you dig, the people and machines you use change the outcome beyond the original idea, and you never really know when to stop digging.

Years ago I was hired by Reuters to build an interface connector between the Liffe trading exchange and their data systems. Another developer started a few weeks after me. In the end we produced about half a dozen modules that worked together to make the connection. But we only produced that many because we were over staffed. In reality the one module I wrote handled 90% of the work required, the other modules were largely superfluous. And certainly the extra time which would have been required to make my module do 100% of the work was less than the time I spent to making sure it worked with the other modules.

Regular readers have probably already recognised Kelly’s Second Law of software: Inside every large development effort there is a small one struggling to get out

This itself is an example of Parkinson’s Law: work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

Actually you might restate my second law as Parkinson’s Law in reverse: constraining the capacity to do work reduces the amount of work to do. If you think about it this is a result of Conway’s Law: system designs copy the communication channels in the organization which creates the system.

Economists see a related phenomenon as the Lump of Work fallacy: people assume there is a fixed lump of work to do. If there are more people to do the work (say from immigration) then there will be unemployment – or possibly wages will be forced down and same work is distributed between more people. However at the level of a national economy it doesn’t work like that. More people means more demand for food, houses, healthcare, schools and so on. What is true in the small is not true in the large. The net effect can be positive for countries but exactly how and by how much is hotly debated.

Software development has its own lump of work fallacy: There isn’t a fixed amount of work to do. Rather than saying “How many people will it take and how long will it take?” It is better to say “If we have five people working on this for three months what progress can we make?”

Writing software is not like digging a hole in the ground: the work to do is neither really known in advance nor is it fixed. Adding people actually increases the amount of work to do – Brooks’s Law.

At the start nobody really knows what it required, they may get lucky but more often that not once the thing is put in front of clients and (potential) customers the ask changes. I’ve heard this called Humphrey’s Law (after Watts Humphrey) although that name is not in common usage and there is another Humphrey’s Law from the world of psychology – which is connected with time estimation discussions for different reasons.

When you put Parkinson’s Law together with this “don’t know until I see it” law you get Hofstadter’s law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

Lets assume for the moment that one can know what is wanted in advance. There is another problem: there are multiple ways to achieve the same result. There is no one true way in software development, there are always multiple ways to achieve the same end result.

Even if one was to fix the big questions – the OS, the delivery platform, the programming language, the database and so on – then you can still create very different implementations for the same thing. Or as I usually put it “there are many ways to dice the onion” – my Crown Jewels post describes how I can get wildly different time and money estimates for what is basically the same piece of work.

Of course this has big consequence for effort estimation – how can anyone estimate effort and costs in these circumstances? Let me go further and suggest that the process of estimating the work to do is more likely than not to increase the amount of work to do. Not only does estimation take time to do itself, but there when estimating there is a tendency to “play safe” and favour larger estimates even thought these estimates are likely to themselves be underestimates (see Vierordt’s law.)

Sometimes it feels like quantum physics: when one parameter is measured another changes, we can know the speed but not the direction, or the direction but not the speed.

I’m not sure I have a complete answer but I have some of the pieces.

Start new work with a Minimally Viable Team: task the team to start immediately, coding starts on day one and in parallel the team work to understand what is needed and create potential solutions.

Keep teams stable: Teams and staffing containing a lot of variables, keeping the team stable (but not static) provides some past performance data to include in calculations. It will at times be necessary for the teams to call in more help – pull more skills and resources as needed.

By working with existing and minimally viable teams the problems are partially constrained: the technologies available are mostly the technologies the team knows already, the number of people available to work on the work is the number of people on the team. In time you may change both these parameters but initially they are constraints to work within.

Lastely, use active portfolio management and governance to kill work which is under performing or escalating beyond expectations. You may want to engage in set-based engineering to increase the chances of success.

The next time someone says “Building software should be like building a house” please remind them you aren’t building a house. What software engineers do is massively more variable and complex than building another example of the same thing.

Back at Reuters, the bright side was that the over engineered system we built wasn’t just used for Liffe, it was used to connect 2 or 3 other exchanges too so maybe the over staffing and over engineering was worth it. Except I don’t believe it really made economic sense, it would have been better to get the one exchange working and only add the minimum to the system when the second and third exchanges came along – diseconomies of scale again.

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A couple of weeks ago I blogged about the top-down or bottom-up question – “OKRs top-down? bottom-up? or ripples on a pond?”

The idea of top-down OKRs keeps cropping up: it needs a name. So please let me introduce Cascading OKRs, or C-OKRs for short.

I only just invented the term so I don’t use it in Succeeding with OKRs in Agile – although I do warn against the idea. The meme is in books and blogs I’ve read, in podcasts I’ve heard and it comes up again and again in Q&A sessions when I do presentations.

The Cascading OKRs idea goes like this: the people at the top of the organisation set OKRs. These are shared with people and teams “below” them. Those teams then write OKRs to support the delivery of the those above them. Their OKRs are in turn shared with “lower” individuals and teams who repeat the processes.

I’ve even heard it suggested that teams take the OKRs from above and use the key results as their objective(s). The key results they create around these objectives can then be used by “lower” teams as their objectives. Hence OKRs cascade down the organisation. (And we all know what Cascades look like don’t we?)

Undoubtedly this interpretation has its own logic – both in the top setting the master OKRs and the lower levels implementing them. It is after all functional decomposition. And I must believe from what I hear that some companies do it this way even if I have never seen it myself. One hopes that it works for these companies, I think it can be better.

C-OKRs are incompatible with the agile mindset because it deprives teams of autonomy. Each team must implement the objectives given to them regardless of what the team believes, regardless of what the team’s customers are asking for, irrespective of the research the product owner/manager has done.

In reducing, even eliminating, autonomy motivation is going to fall too, teams are no longer their own masters.

Nor will this way increase agility because each team must move in lockstep – or perhaps one step behind – the team above them. The cascading hierarchy injects delay.

Cascading OKRs may be easy to grasp, they may be easy to sell, they may follow the logic of hierarchy and management-by-objective but that also means they represent a lost opportunity to integrate OKRs and agile.

Having named Cascading OKRs I need to name the alternative: broadly the approach I advocate in Succeeding with OKRs.

I name this approach White Space OKRs, WS-OKRs.

Organisational leaders should set the vision, the big-hairy-audacious-goal, the ultimate objective, the massively transformative purpose. They should name the mission, they should set the culture and talk about the purpose of the organisation.

And they should leave copious amounts of white space – space for teams to fill.

Those visions should be light on how; they should be light on orders, instructions and mandates. That may seem odd but only by leaving these things out – by leaving white space – can individuals and teams, at all levels, decide how best they can support that mission, goal, purpose or whatever you call it. Planning is disabling.

Because teams decide how to support those goals – while supporting existing customers, legacy business and technology, plus other (potentially completing) demands – team retain autonomy, and autonomy creates motivation and flexibility.

There is one more assumption underlying this which deserves mentioning.

White Space OKRs assume that the teams already exist. With WS-OKRs leaders don’t need to create new teams to deliver their goals because those teams already exist. In other words, the organisation is operating a post-projects model, e.g. product teams, continuous digital, Spotify, or maybe SAFe. That raises an issue of gaps and I’ll return to this another day.

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White space photo from Katie Doherty on Unsplash.

Less is more – I say it so often but it is still a lesson I still have to relearn regularly. Go small. You could say that my most famous blog post is saying just the same thing in fancy language – Software has diseconomies of scale – not economies of scale.

So a couple of weeks ago I was fascinated to see an article in The Economist entitled “Why people forget that less is often more” (paywall) reporting on research published in Nature “People systematically overlook subtractive changes” (another paywall) – being Nature one knows this is serious science.

The researched showed that less is more applies mentally as well as physically. That is, people are far more likely to solve problems by adding elements than by subtracting them – even when subtraction is both viable and costs less (some of the experiments introduced the idea of cost.) The researches even go as far as to suggest this isn’t just a case of believing the additive (more) solution is better than the subtractive, it appears our brains are less likely to consider the a solution which subtracts elements to create a solution.

Last year when I was struggling to complete “Succeeding with OKRs in Agile” I found a solution in removing some chapters. Some were little more than notes, some were in draft and a couple were fully written (and edited). Removing those chapters made the book less, but it made my work load less too – which had an immediate benefit.

It also meant I could finish the book sooner. It meant the copy editing process was quicker and cheaper, and it meant that the book could be published on Amazon and start earning for sooner. But I also believe people like shorter books, I really believe that I’m selling more books because it has less than 200 pages than I would if it had over 200, let alone 300.

This has a bearing on the way companies organise themselves and their processes too. When I first started talking about #NoProjects (which became Project Myopia) I really saw this as a “just remove the project model” – keep doing all the other stuff but just drop projects. Part of me still believes that and while I recognise that some places need more structure I also believe that adding projects is simply overhead for many small companies.

I see it too in the “fear of coding” that many companies have – don’t let people code! Plan it, write it down, estimate it, find the cheapest supplier, argue about it – when simply doing it would be cheaper.

I see it too in the way “agile methods” have grown. Scrum, and XP, are barely viable development models. Compared to RUP they are miniscule. But they worked. Before agile we called them “lightweight”.

Now we have SAFe and other frameworks which bring big thinking back. Nobody would call SAFe lightweight – not with its 10 principles, four configurations and five versions. Perhaps we should have stuck with “lightweight development methods.”

I think it was Alistair Cockburn who once said “Traditional methods are tailored by removing elements, agile methods are tailored by adding.” If the research above is right it was only a matter of time before someone created an “agile method” as big as SAFe.

Finally, another example of less is more: I could write more in this blog but less is more.

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