Velocity

With Christmas around the corner, the UK summer holidays probably feel like ancient history to most people, but it was one sunny day in May that gave me the idea for this post :). Despite various promises on more data related articles, this idea seemed too good not to share - even though it will be brief.

Anyway, back to that sunny day, I had just wrapped up a contract with a client and decided to drive the family down to Italy (Tuscany) for a family friend's 70th birthday celebrations [thanks to Ryan Air for cancelling the flight at short notice]. Anyway, we got the kids out of school early hoping to avoid the perennial Friday afternoon rush hour traffic on the M25 - given that we were going to "one shot it" straight to Tuscany from Bath (approx 18 hours according to Google). We zoomed down the M4 tracking nicely. We go to the M25 and hit the inevitable jam. As I recall, this was about 2.5 hours in and probably cost us a full hour in traffic. Nonetheless the border crossing was smooth and once we hit the wonderful French motorways we picked up some serious speed. A bizarre hail storm in Italy and a few Monster energy drinks later, we arrived in Lucca about 21 hours later.

So what has this got to do with velocity and delivery :). Well as it happens, I had come off an engagement where things didn't quite go to plan. I am now used to working with some extremely good people and have always backed my team to dig us out of any holes. Just luck with the trip to Italy, an hour in traffic which clearly sucked, was neither unexpected, and in the bigger picture, didn't hugely impact our journey time. It is fairly common to get bogged down on a new initiative with things like on boarding issues, team formation etc, etc.

So like my attempted illustration below, it is not uncommon for velocity to be a bit below expected and also, to expect every increasing velocity (up until a point obviously). The red line is kind of how we experienced our trip to Italy, whereas the orange bars are where you "never get into top gear" to extend the motoring analogy.

So what are the lessons here - well I guess it is to be really upfront about progress and even though it may be negative, expose impediments earlier rather than later. Don't bank on the uptick at the end to save your bacon - Hope for best, prepare for the worst.