Wednesday 19 November 2008

The Confidence-o-Meter

A while back we had a project that just seemed destined to face every type of adversity right from the outset (we've all had at least one). Being a new line of business for us, we didn't even have a customer team when work needed to begin! It was going downhill, and with strict regulatory deadlines to meet, we needed to get it back on track. Additional complications arose because the team was new, and as such were still gelling together as they tackled the work. Let's throw in an unusually high dosage of the usual incomplete specifications, changing requirements, and unclear ownership that regularly plague software projects and you have a recipe for a pretty epic train smash.

They say necessity is the mother of invention (Plato?) and there was certainly no shortage of necessity here, so we got on with some serious invention.

The Problem

We needed a way to bring the issues out in the open, in a way that a newly forming team can take ownership of them without accusation and defensiveness creeping in. More urgently still, we had conflicting views on the status of each of the workstreams.

It seemed sensible to start by simply getting in the same room and getting on the same page. To give the time some basic structure, we borrowed some concepts from the planning poker process. There were some basic ideas that made sense for us - getting the team together around a problem, gathering opinion in a way that prevents strong personalities dominating the outcome, and using outliers to zero in on hidden information. As an added bonus, the quasi-familiarity of the process gave the team a sense of purpose and went some way to dispel hostility in a high pressure environment.

The Solution

We started by scheduling a weekly session and sticking to it. Sounds simple, but when the world is coming down around your ears, it is too easy to get caught up in all the reactivity and not make the space to think through what you're doing.

We set aside some time at the end of each week, and our format for the session was fairly simple:
• All the members of the delivery team state their level of confidence that the project will hit its deadline by calling out a number between 1 and 10, 1 being definitely not, 10 being definitely so.
• We record the numbers, then give the lowest and highest numbers an opportunity to speak, uncovering what they know that makes them so much more or less confident than the rest of us. This way the whole group learned about (or dispelled) issues and opportunities they may have been unaware of.
• In light of the new information from the outliers, everyone has an opportunity to revise their confidence estimate. This is recorded in a spreadsheet which lends this post its title.
• Finally we took some time to talk over the most painful issues or obvious opportunities in the project and the team, then picked the most critical one and committed to changing it over the coming week. We also reviewed what we promised ourselves we'd change last week.

Through this discipline the team made, in real time, a bunch of very positive changes to themselves and how they work together without having to stop working and reorganize. We also had a very important index that we could use to gauge exactly how worried we should be - which is pretty important from a risk mitigation perspective. The trend was important too - we were able to observe confidence rise over time, and respond rapidly to the dips which indicated that the team had encountered something that they were worried would prevent them from delivering.

The Outcome

This exercise gained us a much more stable view of a chaotic process, and let us start picking off improvements as we worked. By making the time to do this and being transparent with the discussions and decisions, the team felt more confident and in control of their work - which always helps morale.

Because we were able to give the business a coherent, accurate assessment of where we were at, we were able to confidently ask for the right support - it was easy to show where the rest of the organization could help, and demonstrate the impact if they didn't meet their obligations to us.

In summary, we got our issues out in the open and got our project back on the rails. And by the time we got together for our post-implimentation retrospective, we were pleasantly surprised by how many of our most critical problems we'd already identified and fixed. If you're in a tough spot with a significant piece of work and a fixed deadline, consider giving something like this a try - I think it will work alongside any development methodology.

No comments: