The Project Management tool trap
Project management tools make it easy for your team to focus more on deployed code than on learning how to make customers happy.
Deployed code
PMTs focus almost entirely on deployed code. They help your team track what there is to do, whether it can be done, when it can be done, and whether it’s done or not.
Validated learning about customers
But in the midst of all the completed and pending tickets inside your PMT, questions like “Do customers really like feature x?” tend to either not get asked, or get lost in the fray.
This is a shame, because while it’s great that feature x was deployed, and it’s nice to know that something was accomplished, the customer happiness side is forgotten.
As Pete notes “It’s critical to not lose oneself in the eye-candy and the clickety-click of project completion and a team must constantly reorient itself to the goals.”
Thanks to Pete and Trevor for great feedback on the much longer first draft of this post!
April 14, 2009
Mischa, I think correlating project management tools to be obfuscating your money-making goals is as at least as slippery as treating task completion as the one true unit of progress.
April 14, 2009 at 11:02 PMI don't think it's a "false sense of accomplishment." It's accomplishment, no doubt about it. Checking off stuff makes us humanoids feel good. Is the morale boost worth nothing? Maybe it helps the team accomplish its goals.
For every goal, there are a number of causal actions. For every causal action, there is a metric. Defining the goals is hard (especially hard in bureaucracies, rather straightforward perhaps in startups), defining the causal actions much harder, but once you've done the hard work the right metrics -- units of progress in your vocab -- often emerge rather obviously. Coincidentally, screwing up the goals/causal actions part makes whatever you're measuring rather irrelevant!!
Somewhere in this post there's the lesson you were trying to teach: while PMT's are well and good, it's critical to not lose oneself in the eye-candy and the clickety-click of project completion and a team must constantly reorient itself to the goals. You are really close, I just got a little lost.
Keep rocking in the free world,
-Pete
I think you're onto something, but I liked your "customer driven iteration" post a bit better. In my opinion, delivering features sometimes does equal progress, but it shouldn't be confused with reaching the goal (more customers, more money).
April 15, 2009 at 3:06 AMMy takeaway from these two posts is this: delivering features that your customers don't want is a waste of time. Since we can't always be right in our predictions of what our customers want, we should spend less time at the whiteboard imagining all of the cool new features we can deliver, and more time measuring our progress toward our goal (more customers, more money).