A Project That Is Always?Late

I found an interesting email that I sent out long long time ago. This old email quite nicely captures the pain of project work when you are "late". The question to you is: have you been there? Did you feel the same?

I need to make the disclaimers. The mail was sent a long time ago. It does not represent my company is it stands today. It doesn’t represent the company I worked in as it did stand then. Everybody has their ups and downs. Also, I needed to make a few edits to the post to make it more general.

So, here goes…

Being late

I think we are in a project that is constantly late. Trying to remember back to last autumn and starting to read the mails I’ve been sending the steering committee and other people tell the story. Personally, I’ve felt the pain all the time. We were supposed to release something at the end of February. We were planning to release something at the end of March. We were supposed to do the XYZ, but we didn’t make it. The list goes on and on. We are playing catch-up all the time. Finally we are starting to be close to a release, but the next scheduled releases are already late compared to the official plans.

This is a sickness with symptoms.

The team is feeling the pressure of working for the goals of the project. This is too harsh most of the time as innovation and learning takes time. We have not been using the time allowed (or even required) for R&D for internal improvements. Here’s an example: We are seeing the test automation as really crucial for future success, but we choose not to invest to it to keep our schedules. We have been keeping up artificially high product related velocity at the cost of our future. We can only increase the quality of the product by being more late.

Secondly to keep our targets, we are systematically setting the short-term goal too high. It is apparent that during the spring time we have not had even a “greenish” result. We have all the time missed our targets. This is jeopardizing the iterative way of working and completing what has been started. It has become the norm to continue work on items in the next month. Instead it should be an exception.

We have to do constant work with the roadmap. This would be a great thing if the roadmap was not a contract; that is a promise. We have to go back on our promises all the time which is psychologically very hard. I’m all for working on the roadmap level, but we have to work in a more constructive manner – “Customer collaboration over contract negotiation”. We should apply this agile principle also in the roadmapping work.

This time has been mentally very tough for me. I take the responsibility of the project and constant failing will get to one sooner or later. The fun part of the job for me has been diminished. I’ve found myself straying far from what I set out to accomplish – too far I think. I count the project context as one of the contributing factors here. I also think that the whole project team is starting to feel the frustration.

I’m really concerned about the summer and fall time. I don’t think we can keep up being late. We are however setting ourselves big time for being late. It’s not healthy.