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How to determine if systemic factors slow down your teams’ velocity

August 2, 2019 by LaunchTomorrow Leave a Comment

Last week, I pulled out the critical thing that Steve Jobs did, upon returning to an Apple computer with a sagging stock price. He went after a major systemic factor that was holding back release dates: too many priorities. If you are really going after top performance, you need to look at all factors, including the global ones.

Local or global maximum?

Mountain tops above clouds

people per product = people/nr of products or projects

The large the number of “buckets” you need to fill, the higher the denominator. The higher the denominator, the less resources you have to succeed with each product. New or existing.

This is the true cost of lack of focus. Because if you are under-resourcing your product teams, you are effectively setting them up for failure and yourself up for disappointment as a decision-maker.

Signs of this would include:

  • Heavy reliance on traditional project management (waterfall): as there are lots of resource conflicts, you need a caste of professionals to manage this, each with their own specialty. Which adds more cost. Note that they don’t actually contribute to the work that needs to be done directly.
  • partial employee allocations: For example, allocating 5 people at 20% will mean that all 5 people will spend most of their time in status meetings and unable to actually deliver anything. But you have the slot fully allocated, right?
  • shifting team structures: If needs are constantly changing due to thrashing, then there is constant complexity around what needs to be done, who needs to do it, and by when. So you’re spending a lot of time figuring out how to achieve new goal with the limited resources you have and who you can nab from elsewhere.

2. Too many chiefs

For anyone who remembers high school physics, there was one important distinction between velocity and speed–as my friend Andy Wilkin recently pointed out. Velocity had an implied direction. One direction.

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