OTT Issue #10: Don't Do the Work that Isn't Worth Doing

What does it mean to only do the work worth doing??

This week the AgileSherpas team got to joking about the need for an auto-delete feature that would make unfinished tasks disappear on the last day of our sprint.?

It started out as good natured chat banter when one of our team members acknowledged that client demands were interfering with some of his commitments, but it got me wondering what would happen if that work really?did?disappear.?

If you knew that you could no longer touch a certain task if you didn’t finish it by the end of a sprint, what would that do to your sense of urgency? If there was literally no way to carry it into a future iteration, would you prioritize your time differently, moving heaven and earth to get that work done??

Or are there some tasks that you would be fine to see fade into nothingness? Some things would surely get barely a casual shoulder shrug as you watched them go, secretly pleased to never again have them polluting your to-do list.?

The way I see it, this end of sprint doomsday deletion thought experiment is an interesting twist on traditional prioritization. It might help us get hyper critical about how we’re spending our time at a very granular, individual level.?

And that’s the level where, in my experience, priorities tend to break down anyway.

It’s relatively easy for me as a senior leader to determine the three OKRs we’re focusing on this quarter. It’s not too hard to use those OKRs to prioritize team backlogs as the quarter progresses.?

Where things get messy is when you start to look at individual people’s days.

Even when someone knows – and is totally committed to – the priorities for the organization and for their team, complications creep in. They make reasonable sprint commitments based on the well-groomed backlog, and they enter the sprint confident in their ability to succeed and deliver value.

Then a client emergency demands unexpected hours out of the week. Someone finds broken links in an eBook that’s being actively promoted. A panelist for an upcoming webinar bows out at the last minute. They just can’t get that final approval for a case study from the client’s legal team.

Of course they have to jump in and fix the problems RIGHT NOW. No time to pause and reflect! No time for weighing relative priority! Things are broken! All hands on deck! Iceberg right ahead!?

Then, next thing they know, the end of the sprint is upon them. It’s a big looming deadline for all the work that got neglected. They end up stuck in crisis mode dealing with the domino effect from the first round of problems, and they may even pull others in to help as well.??

At that point the domino effect becomes one?big game of domino rally as the first wave of crises ripples out to impact the work of more and more people.?

Quality suffers. Burnout looms. Deadlines slip.

As a leader you can see row after row of dominoes falling, but it seems impossible to stop it once it’s started.?

But if you ever played domino rally as a kid you know that it was actually really easy to break the flow. If you put too much space between just a couple of dominoes, the whole thing could freeze. In other words, if we pull out the right thing – if we let the right piece of work get deleted automatically at the end of a sprint – we might be able to end perpetual crisis mode and make time for reprioritization.?

Maybe sometimes going off the trail doesn’t mean doing things differently. Maybe sometimes it’s not doing things at all.?

So take a look at your backlogs and your Kanban boards this week, and ask yourself what work you wouldn’t miss if it disappeared at the end of your next sprint.?

If you find some, don’t wait for the auto-delete feature; just pull that domino right now.

- Andrea